Sense and Essence: Heritage and the Cultural Production of the Real 9781785339417

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Sense and Essence

Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement Edited by Birgit Meyer, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University, and Maruška Svašek, School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, Queen’s University, Belfast. During the last few years, a lively, interdisciplinary debate has taken place between anthropologists, art historians and scholars of material culture, religion, visual culture and media studies about the dynamics of material production and cultural mediation in an era of intensifying globalization and transnational connectivity. Understanding ‘mediation’ as a fundamentally material process, this series provides a stimulating platform for ethnographically grounded theoretical debates about the many aspects that constitute relationships between people and things, including political, economic, technological, aesthetic, sensorial and emotional processes. Volume 1 Moving Subjects, Moving Objects Transnationalism, Cultural Production and Emotions Edited by Maruška Svašek Volume 2 Growing Artefacts, Displaying Relationships Yams, Art and Technology amongst the Nyamikum Abelam of Papua New Guinea Ludovic Coupaye

Volume 6 Creativity in Transition Politics and Aesthetics of Cultural Production Across the Globe Edited by Maruška Svašek and Birgit Meyer Volume 7 Death, Materiality and Mediation An Ethnography of Remembrance in Ireland Barbara Graham

Volume 3 Object and Imagination Perspectives on Materialization and Meaning Edited by Øivind Fuglerud and Leon Wainwright

Volume 8 Ethnographies of Movement, Sociality and Space Place-Making in the New Northern Ireland Edited by Milena Komarova and Maruška Svašek

Volume 4 The Great Reimagining Public Art, Urban Space and the Symbolic Landscapes of a ‘New’ Northern Ireland Bree T. Hocking

Volume 9 Sense and Essence Heritage and the Cultural Production of the Real Edited by Birgit Meyer and Mattijs van de Port

Volume 5 Having and Belonging Homes and Museums in Israel Judy Jaffe-Schagen

Sense and Essence Heritage and the Cultural Production of the Real

Edited by

Birgit Meyer and Mattijs van de Port

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2018 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2018 Birgit Meyer and Mattijs van de Port All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Meyer, Birgit, editor. | Port, Mattijs van de, 1961- editor. Title: Sense and essence : heritage and the cultural production of the real / edited by Birgit Meyer and Mattijs van de Port. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2018. | Series: Material mediations : people and things in a world of movement ; 9 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018001771 (print) | LCCN 2018017765 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785339417 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785339394 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781785339400 (paperback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Ethnic identity. | Group identity. | Originality (Aesthetics) | Material culture. Classification: LCC GN495.6 (ebook) | LCC GN495.6 .S44 2018 (print) | DDC 305.8--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001771 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78533-939-4 hardback ISBN 978-1-78533-940-0 paperback ISBN 978-1-78533-941-7 ebook

• Contents

List of Illustrations vii Prefacexi Introduction1 Heritage Dynamics: Politics of Authentication, Aesthetics of Persuasion and the Cultural Production of the Real   Mattijs van de Port and Birgit Meyer  1.  Aesthetics as Form and Force: Notes on the Shaping of Pataxó Indian Bodies   André Werneck de Andrade Bakker

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 2. Intangible Heritage, Tangible Controversies: The Baiana and the Acarajé as Boundary Objects in Contemporary Brazil   Bruno Reinhardt

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 3. Swinging between the Material and the Immaterial: Brazilian Cultural Politics and the Authentication of Afro-Brazilian Heritage109   Maria Paula Fernandes Adinolfi  4. ‘Reporting the Past’: News History and the Formation of the Sunday Times Heritage Project   Duane Jethro

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 5. Scaffolding Heritage: Transient Architectures and Temporalizing Formations in Luanda   Ruy Llera Blanes

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 6. Corpo-Reality TV: Media, Body and the Authentication of ‘African Heritage’   Marleen de Witte

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vi Contents

 7. ‘Heated Discussions Are Necessary’: The Creative Engagement with Sankofa in Modern Ghanaian Art   Rhoda Woets

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 8. Iconic Objects: Making Diasporic Heritage, Blackness and Whiteness in the Netherlands   Markus Balkenhol

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 9. Ascertaining the Future Memory of Our Time: Dutch Institutions Collecting Relics of National Tragedy   Irene Stengs

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Concluding Comments 10. Heritage under Construction: Boundary Objects, Scaffolding and Anticipation   David Chidester

291

11. Can Anything Become Heritage?   David Berliner

299

12. Heritage as Process   Ciraj Rassool

306

Index313

•

Illustrations

 1.1 Nayara and the dawn of ‘cultural rescue’ in Coroa Vermelha.

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  1.2 and 1.3  The couple Syratã (teacher of culture) and Noêhmia at the Aragwaksã annual ritual at the Jaqueira Reserve in 2010.

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 1.4 Adjoined photographs of the Body Paint section of the didactic book Leituras Pataxó: Raízes e Vivências do Povo Pataxó nas Escolas (2005: 90, 91).

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 1.5 Syratã pyrographing a wooden peão with the Pataxó male motif.58  1.6 Cultural traffic: Ariema at the Kuikuro village in the Xingu National Park.

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 1.7 Motif variations of body painting (male, chest).

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 1.8 Motif variations of body painting (male, back).

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 1.9 Motif variations of body painting (female, chest).

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1.10 Female body painting (back).

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1.11 The Jaqueira beetle.

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1.12 Aponé painting Juari for his wedding ceremony.

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1.13 and 1.14  The designing of Pataxó bodies at the Ritual of the Waters in Retirinho village in 2010.

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 2.1 Acarajés offered to the Orisha Iansã during a Candomblé ceremony.80  2.2 Baianas de acarajé attending a meeting organized by Brazil’s Heritage Agency, IPHAN.  3.1 An example of baroque heritage: the prophet Isaías by sculptor Aleijadinho. Late eighteenth century, Congonhas do Campo, Minas Gerais, Brazil.

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viii Illustrations

 3.2 Pai Ro, priest from Candomblé, in front of the altar of the caboclo spirit Green Feather. Santo Amaro, Bahia, Brazil.

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 4.1 Memory sign, Places of Remembrance, by Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, Bayerisches Viertel, Schöneberg, Berlin.

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 4.2 Brenda Fassie Memorial, Bassline Studios, Newtown, Johannesburg.144  4.3 Collage of books and media products produced by the Sunday Times Heritage Project. 

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 4.4 Screenshot by the author, Sunday Times Heritage Project Website.151  5.1 The Dubaization of Luanda.

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 5.2 The new centrality of Kilamba.

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  5.3 and 5.4  The Tokoist Cathedral, then and now.

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 5.5 The Tokoist temple in Palanca.

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  5.6 and 5.7  Churches in the Palanca.

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 5.8 Prayer in the ICUES temple in Palanca.

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 5.9 The ICUES temple in Palanca.

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 6.1 TV Africa studio set, decorated with Fang masks from Gabon and Shona sadza batik from Zimbabwe.

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 6.2 Nungua Cultural Troupe performing at Omanya Aba.195  6.3 Drumming and dancing continues on the street.

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 6.4 Numo Sakumo Wәyoo, priestess of Sakumo, in the Omanye Aba studio.

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 7.1 Wiz Edinam Kudowar (2010), Sankofa variant, acrylic on canvas.213  7.2 Bernard Akoi-Jackson (2014). Conceptual photographic sketch of proposed installation view. Untitled: Glocalocations. Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

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 8.1 Protest against De Kom statue, Amsterdam Zuidoost, 24 April 2006.241  8.2 Statue of Anton de Kom, Jikke van Loon 2006, wood and bronze.246  8.3 The Surinamese Writer and Resistance Fighter Anton de Kom (1898–1945), author and date unknown.

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 8.4 A Yoruba mask being scanned.

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 8.5 The raw data being rendered.

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Illustrations ix

 8.6 The mask being milled in polyurethane foam.

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 8.7 Kabra ancestor dance mask, Boris van Berkum, 2013. Lacquered polyurethane foam, textile, wood. 66 x 40 x 40 cm. Collection Amsterdam Museum.

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 9.1 Workers of the Amsterdam Sanitation Department selecting items to be preserved as part of the clearing of the Theo van Gogh memorial site, one week after the murder (10 November 2004).271  9.2 Object NG-2004-72-2.

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 9.3 The film container in a truck on its way to preservation (10 November 2004).

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 9.4 The 2012 Pim Fortuyn ‘Commemoration Memorial’ consisting of original 2002 commemorative objects.

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 9.5 The ‘Wall of Compassion’ (2015) constructed from the cuddly toys left at various sites in commemoration of the MH17 victims in 2014.

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• Preface

This volume is the outcome of a longstanding, intense and stimulating collaboration. The research on which the chapters are based was made possible through the multidisciplinary research programme Cultural Dynamics (2008–2014) funded by the Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research (NWO). Within this framework, we were enabled to set up our research project – ‘Heritage Dynamics: Politics of Authentication and Aesthetics of Persuasion in Brazil, Ghana, South Africa and the Netherlands’ – that focused on processes of heritagemaking and the contestations ensuing in various settings in Africa, Brazil and the Netherlands (2008–2013). This project was chaired by the two of us and historian Herman Roodenburg, and involved PhD students, and postdoctoral and affiliated researchers working on Brazil (Maria Paula Fernandes Adinolfi, André Werneck de Andrade Bakker), Ghana (Marleen de Witte, Rhoda Woets), South Africa (Duane Jethro), and the Netherlands (Markus Balkenhol, Irene Stengs). David Chidester, Luis Nicolau, Kodjo Senah, and Ciraj Rassool acted as advisors. Later we were able to pursue our research on the formation of heritage within the international project ‘Currents of Faith – Places of History’ in the context of the Cultural Encounters programme (2013–2016) launched by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA). For more information about this inter-European collaborative project, see: http:// currents-of-faith.ics.ul.pt. Contributors to this volume affiliated with ‘Currents of Faith’ are Ruy Blanes and David Berliner, as well as Markus Balkenhol, Bruno Reinhardt and ourselves. We greatly enjoyed working in the stimulating research environments across various locations in Europe, Africa and Brazil, which were made possible thanks to these projects, and would like to thank all contributors to this volume for engaging in a long-term fruitful conversation. We would also like to thank Gordon Ramsey for his superb editorial work and for making the index, Saskia Huygen for her efficient logistic assistance in assembling the

xii Preface

manuscript, and Burke Gerstenschlager, Harry Eagles and Caroline Kuhtz at Berghahn for taking such good care of this book project and making it materialize as a volume. Birgit Meyer and Mattijs van de Port Amsterdam/Utrecht, April 2018

INTRODUCTION Heritage Dynamics Politics of Authentication, Aesthetics of Persuasion and the Cultural Production of the Real

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Mattijs van de Port and Birgit Meyer

Fundamentally, heritage formation denotes the processes whereby, out of the sheer infinite number of things, places and practices that have been handed down from the past, a selection is made that is qualified as ‘a precious and irreplaceable resource, essential to personal and collective  identity and necessary for self-respect’ (Lowenthal 2005: 81). Clearly, heritage  formation is inextricably entangled with another much-noted  tendency in our globalizing world: the ‘culturalization’ of politics, citizenship, economics, religion and other areas of social life, whereby ‘cultural identities’ and concomitant ‘sentiments of belonging’ are prominently brought into play in the political arena (Mazzarella 2004; Geschiere 2009; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Duyvendak, Hurenkamp and Tonkens 2011). Yet,  what makes heritage stand out, is the self-conscious attempt of  heritage makers to canonize culture, to single out, fix and define particular historical legacies as ‘essential’ and ­constitutive of the collective. Due to the link between heritage production and the making of collectives, processes of heritage formation have offered scholars from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds an exceptionally rich field in which to conduct empirical research into such larger themes as statehood, nation-building, ethnogenesis, social memory, the culturalization of citizenship or identity politics. Unsurprisingly, many anthropologists have made themselves heard in these debates. First of all, because heritage production is a particular mode of culture-making, anthropological

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insights are immediately relevant to ongoing discussions regarding its saliency and appeal in the contemporary world (see Adams 2005). In addition, anthropologists found that the thriving heritage industry offered them the possibility to ‘close the gap between anthropology and public policy’ (Hackenberg 2002: 288), and bring anthropological expertise to fields beyond academia. At the same time, anthropologists have been at the forefront of critically exploring the operation of UNESCO heritage institutions in concrete locations outside Europe, showing, on the basis of detailed ethnographic research, how discourses and policies pertaining to  heritage are adopted and adapted  – ‘on the ground’ (Brumann and Berliner 2016). Our own move into the field of heritage studies was driven by somewhat different concerns. Of course, as anthropologists, we too were intrigued by the particular mode of making culture in the framework of cultural heritage, which we had encountered in the different fields where we do research (Ghana and Brazil), as well as in the Netherlands, the country where we live and work. This volume is based on a longstanding research collaboration of the contributors, who work on different regions (Brazil, Ghana, Angola, the Netherlands and South Africa) but share a strong interest in the formation of heritage in pluralistic settings, in which hegemonic modes of claiming the past are contested and coexist with alternative heritage forms.1 Our interest in the study of cultural heritage did not originate from within the field of heritage studies, but from a broader interest in understanding the ‘politics and aesthetics of world-making’ (Meyer 2015a, 2016) and the ‘cultural construction of the real’ (Van de Port 2011). We intuited that an in-depth study of concrete cases of heritage formation, and the tensions and debates they revealed, would provide us with an excellent opportunity to think through – and act upon – our growing dissatisfaction with a particular kind of constructivist argumentation that we frequently encounter in anthropological writings: the kind that presents as a conclusion its finding that the history is ‘assembled’, the community is ‘imagined’, the tradition is ‘invented’ or the identity is ‘staged’. Such conclusions, we suggest, stop at the point where the research should begin. 2 For if histories, communities, traditions and identities are fabricated, how then is it that people manage to convince themselves and others that this is not the case (see also Meyer  2009; Van de Port 2004, 2012)? Before elaborating this critique, and proposing ways to move beyond the premature closure of constructivist argumentation, here is a concrete example that may illustrate the sources of our dissatisfaction. In November 2011, in Salvador da Bahia (Brazil), we organized a roundtable discussion with ‘local stakeholders’ in heritage issues. On the stage of the auditorium of the Museu Eugênio Teixeira Leal sat representatives of Bahian quilombo communities (descendants of escaped slaves); representatives from the Pataxó, an indigenous people from southern Bahia; and a number of Brazilian anthropologists. At one point during

Introduction 3

the discussion, the topic on the table was the ‘ethnogenesis’ of indigenous people in north-eastern Brazil. The anthropologists in our panel discussed the strategies deployed by indigenous groups to have their claims to be ‘Indians’ recognized by the state. The anthropologists had drawn attention to the recent invention by indigenous groups of practices that marked their ethnic distinctiveness as ‘Indian’, and had wondered how to evaluate the ‘authenticity’ of the identity claims made by the tribesmen. Had these groups merely ‘invented’ themselves as Indians? A young Pataxó woman in the panel – Anari Braz Bomfim, a student at the Department of Ethnic and African Studies at the Federal University of Bahia – had been listening patiently to the discussion, and at one point the moderator asked her what she thought of the issues put forward by the anthropologists. She stated: ‘Well, this issue of the Pataxó being invented or not … As far as I know, people have been inventing themselves and reinventing themselves since the beginning of times. Isn’t that what people always do? So, what exactly is the issue? Just because we have invented ourselves, can we not be real Pataxó?’ (for a full account of this event, see André Bakker in this volume). Anari Braz Bomfim’s remark speaks directly to the issue that is at the heart of this volume. Constructivist approaches to reality urge researchers to show the made-up in the taken for granted, and many anthropologists have taken up this task and have become very skilful at it (see Clifford 1988: 277ff.). Constructivism calls for a critical engagement with cultural identities. Interlocutors’ claims that the reality of something – a tradition, an identity, a history – is given are not taken at face value, but framed in a narrative that shows how the claimant failed to recognize the constructedness in the object that was brought up for analysis. Now, we would insist that showing the made-up in the taken for granted is – and should remain – one of the major tasks of anthropologists. As Richard Handler reminds us, ‘despite the recent persuasiveness of constructivism  in social science, objectivist notions of authenticity remain hegemonic in many late-capitalist institutions, such as the art market, museums and courts of law’ (2001: 964). Those with a more political inclination might add that there are simply too many fundamentalists around these days – of all backgrounds and beliefs – to give up on infusing some doubts here and there. Or that, in a world where the demand for essentializing and totalizing discourses seems to be on the rise, it still makes sense to hold up a mirror that reveals how such narratives are stitched together. Nevertheless, we find that too often, arguments about the ways in which lifeworlds are constructed become conclusions and closures, rather than incentives to ask new questions. One alternative line of questioning – the one we will pursue in this volume – is present in the remark by that young Pataxó woman in response to a typical constructivist narrative: ‘So we have reinvented ourselves. So what?’ Clearly, the analytical deconstruction of

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her identity did not exhaust its significance, or diminish the fullness of its lived reality. What she seemed to be saying was: Yes, you can say this about my identity. But your conclusion is the product of a certain analytical procedure, one that is picking things apart, breaking up past and present, act and performance, name and substance, and so on. So yes, your statement is true within the confines of that analytical procedure. But what if I do not submit my identity to this breaking up? What if I seek to know being Pataxó differently, by keeping its fullness intact, by barring the questioning mind and allowing all that makes itself present to my conscienciousness and sensorium to simply be?

What Anari Braz Bomfim helped us to see, then, is the increasing gap between an experience-distant constructivist way of knowing and an experiential way of knowing. With characteristic sarcasm, Bruno Latour sought to expose this gap in his example of the critical sociologist studying a pilgrimage site, where a pilgrim tells him that he had travelled to the monastery because he was called by the Virgin Mary. Faced with such a remark, says Latour, the critical sociologist already knows that this is ‘of course’ not what is really going on. How long should we resist smiling smugly, replacing at once the agency of the Virgin by the ‘obvious’ delusion of an actor ‘finding pretext’ in a religious icon to ‘hide’ one’s own decision? Critical sociologists will answer: ‘Just as far as to be polite, because it’s bad manners to sneer in the presence of the informant’. (2005: 48)

Alternatively, Latour suggests taking interlocutors – their theories, their metaphysics, their ontologies – seriously: following their modes of understanding ‘no matter what metaphysical imbroglios they lead us into’ (Latour 2005: 48). In our own way, we have tried to take this critique to heart. Incontestable research findings that the tradition is ‘invented’, the community ‘imagined’ or the identity ‘performed’ are nothing more (and nothing less) than the outcome of a particular, constructivist mode of analysis. Such outcomes are not necessarily untrue, and they may even be very close to what our interlocutors tell us (as clearly, they too may question, doubt and ‘deconstruct’ what is taken for granted in their lifeworlds). But there are many ways of knowing traditions, communities and identities, and consequently many different tales to tell about them. The tales that we want to present in this volume seek to ‘think away’ from the idea that humanmade worlds are merely fabricated, and ponder the question how traditions, communities and identities come to be experienced as really real. The fact that a new generation of Pataxó reintroduced feathers and grass skirts to their wardrobes, and opted for the woods again, should not be addressed with simple dualisms of real and fake, which are too crude to govern a sophisticated analysis. The fact that many Pataxó understood that there is something to be gained by adopting that ethnic label does not reduce them

Introduction 5

to political actors who instrumentalize ‘identity’ in the pursuit of socioeconomic struggles. The fact that the Pataxó are aware of the construct, but take it for real nonetheless, forces us to rethink some of the dichotomies that govern our own thinking: we would like to question the ‘factishes’ of Western metaphysics (Latour 2010); reconsider ‘faking-it’ as the precondition of all social life (Miller 2005); and ponder such possibilities as the ‘genuinely made-up’ (Van de Port 2012) and ‘authentic fakes’ (Chidester 2005). This approach also calls for a critique of the facile assumption that revealing the constructedness of cultural forms is the privilege of scholars, while those living with and by these forms cannot help but take them for real. In fact, this assumption often proves to be mistaken – as people may be very well prepared to acknowledge the constructed nature of a cultural (or religious) form and yet regard it as real. In this sense, fabrication does not necessarily stand in opposition to the real but brings it about, in ways that may go beyond the acts and intentions of the makers and users (Latour 2010: 22–23, see also Van de Port 2012; Meyer 2015b: 12). It seems to us that our analytical toolkit is lacking when it comes to addressing the issue of how social constructs are both fabricated and experienced as fully real. We may even be hindered here by romantic undercurrents in our thinking, which equate that which is made-up with that which is false: a point we will elaborate below. One way to move forward is to pay attention, counter-intuitively perhaps, to the experiential underpinnings of ‘essentialist modes of argumentation’.3 Essentialist arguments are grounded in ‘a belief in the real, true essence of things, the perceived properties that define the “whatness” of an entity’ (Fuss 1989: xi; cf. Fuchs 2001). Understandably, such essentialist claims violate anthropological relativism and have largely been rejected in the mainstream of anthropological theory ‘as one of the besetting conceptual sins of anthropology’ (Herzfeld 1996: 188). Nonetheless, as Gerd Baumann (1999) has brilliantly shown, essentialist modes of argumentation are at the heart of contemporary ‘culture speak’, where they alternate with more deconstructivist argumentations, through which people express their willingness and capacity to relativize cultural essences that have been set in stone. Rather than shun ‘essentialism’ as a terrible mistake, it merits scholarly attention (Friedman, in Grillo 2003: 166).4 More concretely, what we propose is to focus on the materials, techniques, skills, capacities and alternative imaginations that go into the cultural production of the real – the ways in which people manage (or fail) to convince themselves and others of the givenness of their cultural identity. As Michael Taussig phrased it a long time ago: (faced with) the once unsettling observation that most of what seems important in life is made up and is neither more (nor less) than, as a certain turn of phrase would have it, ‘a social construction’ … it seems to me that not enough surprise has been expressed as to how we nevertheless get on with living, pretending that we live facts, not fictions. (1993: xv)

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This then, was the research agenda with which we entered the field of heritage studies. We were eager to find out what makes up the facticity of the fact. We wanted to investigate what it is that people mobilize – in themselves and in the world – to transcend the fictions. We sought to explore the resources they tap – and the faculties they engage – to make their real, real, and their certain, certain. This volume showcases the outcome of this endeavour. Processes of heritage formation, as the detailed studies offered in the chapters show, proved to be a fruitful field in which to study such endeavours in the cultured construction of the real, for the very reason that the formation of heritage brings many of the issues discussed above to the surface. As noted above, the appeal of cultural heritage often rests on its denial of being merely made-up: on its promise to provide an essential ground to socialcultural identities. In the contemporary world, however, heritage formation takes place in pluralistic societies, where different groups seek certainty and guidance in different canons of truth, which only partly overlap and are positioned in a hegemonic order. Members of these societies may not agree what legacies of what past are to be singled out as a ‘defining feature’ of the collective, or what history was fundamental to its formation. Due to such contestations, the givenness of heritage formations is constantly questioned, as claimants seek to highlight that heritage formations are made to serve the interests of some but not of others. At the same time, there is a constant investment in the production of alternative cultural forms that are profiled as heritage, as many instances of heritage-making presented in this volume show. The puzzling fact that, notwithstanding the prominence of discourses that deconstruct heritage claims as invented, heritage formations are thriving, and embraced by many as repositories of essence and truth, calls for two concepts we would like to introduce to the study of heritage formations: ‘politics of authentication’ and ‘aesthetics of persuasion’. Taking as a starting point that authenticity is not an essence to be discovered in a particular form of cultural heritage but a quality produced in such a form, the former allows us to explore the processes through which heritage is authorized in specific power constellations. The latter seeks to help us describe how heritage is appropriated and embodied in lived experience. First, however, a brief exploration of the field of heritage studies is called for.

The ‘Heritage Buzz’: Entering the Field of Heritage Studies The ‘sense of heritage’, says David C. Harvey, is of all times. In his intriguing article, which documents how ‘the desire to highlight the presence of the past in the present’ (2001: 319) was manifested in Medieval Europe, he reminds us that heritage formations are no novelty. Nonetheless, in many places around the globe, researchers have observed a marked acceleration of heritage production: a veritable run on the ‘heritage’ label, involving evernew actors, and an ever-expanding network of agencies and institutions.

Introduction 7

This has prompted some authors to speak of a ‘heritage craze’. 5 Rather than the term ‘craze’, with its connotations of the irrational, the short-lived and the flimsy, we prefer the term ‘heritage buzz’ to refer to the booming interest in ‘heritage’; the widespread enthusiasm that the idea of ‘heritage’ garners across the globe; and the rapidly growing number of actors seeking to include new items onto the inventory lists of heritage agencies. A brief look at these inventory lists immediately reveals the acceleration of heritage production, as they show the enormous diversity of the items that are deemed eligible for the qualification, ‘heritage’. As an initially Western notion, ‘heritage’ proved to travel well across the world with the rise of UNESCO policies to safeguard ‘world heritage’. Next to architectural treasures such as the historical town centre of Agadez in Niger and the mosque in Djenné, Mali, Bukchon Hanok village in South Korea, Borobodur on Java, Indonesia, the temples of Angkor, Cambodia, or the Rietveld Schröder House in the Netherlands, one finds ‘cultural landscapes’ such as the Sulaiman-Too Sacred Mountain in Kyrgyzstan or the Forest of the Cedars of God in Lebanon;6 next to rusty industrial sites that not too long ago would have been demolished without a second thought.7 One also finds such humble items as the deep-fried bean fritters called acarajé sold on the streets of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil (see Reinhardt in this volume), or shipwrecks off the coast of England.8 Under the more recent rubric of ‘intangible’ heritage one encounters the Japanese washi craftsmanship of traditional handmade paper and the Bosnian embroidery technique called zmijanje;9 religious rituals such as the Mevlevi Sema Ceremony in Turkey or the dancing procession of Echternach in Luxembourg; carnivals in Hungary, Bolivia and Belgium and Karabakh horse riding in Azerbaijan; the polyphonic singing of the Aka Pygmies in the Central African Republic and the Armenian wind instrument called duduk. Even ‘Viennese Coffee House Culture’ and ‘the Mediterranean diet’ have been designated as ­elements of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.10 All these different objects, sites and practices became ‘heritage’ through complex processes of lobbying, consultation, research, public debates, fundraising, bureaucratic procedures of institutionalization and political decision-making (and clearly, many heritage ‘candidates’ fail to be acknowledged). For a long time, heritage-making was the prerogative of the state. In the nineteenth century – where most scholars locate the beginning of heritage formation – National Museums were built across Europe and endowed with the task of assembling material evidence for a past that was suitable to the present aspirations of the nation state (Bendix, Eggert and Peselmann 2013).11 In the contemporary world, however, heritage agencies have appeared at all levels of institutional politics, opening up spaces way beyond the museum as prime site of heritage formation (Brosius and Polit 2011; Peterson, Gavua and Rassool 2015). The state continues to be a major actor in the discovery, excavation, research, recuperation and exhibit of heritage items, but in many countries, municipalities and provinces are

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producing their own inventory lists, declaring certain objects, places and practices to be of ‘essential value’ for ‘the culture and history of the local community’. Besides state agencies, many other actors are active in the heritage field. Global agencies such as UNESCO are actively producing ‘world heritage’, in an attempt to produce a community of values that includes all of humankind and at the same time acknowledges cultural diversity.12 In democratic, plural societies, debates as to who is included in the selection of heritage items and who is excluded (a point we will elaborate below) have driven social movements, NGOs and lobby groups to enter the field of heritage politics questioning the legitimacy of some heritage items and developing alternative inventory lists. This also involves struggles to bring back to collective memory atrocities of the past – slave-trading, colonialism, apartheid – via memorials, commemorations, and repatriation of human remains from Western medical institutions (Balkenhol, this volume; Jethro, this volume; see also Rassool 2015). The market has discovered the popular appeal of heritage, and commercial enterprises, cultural entrepreneurs, artists, tourist agencies and media organizations are all attracted to – and active in – the heritage field, where they seek to capitalize on its values (see Jethro; Woets; De Witte; all this volume; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Peterson 2015: 18–29). In the religious field, certain forms and practices currently in decline have been recast as heritage, drawing yet another class of actors into this arena.13 Furthermore, underprivileged groups may resort to cultural heritage discourses to back their identity claims and profile their ‘culture’ for tourism (see Andre Bakker and Bruno Reinhardt, this volume). Last, but not least, universities and research institutes are fully involved in heritage production, with findings being discussed in annual conferences and published in numerous specialist journals. Year after year, a steady stream of heritage experts can be seen moving from university campuses to the labour market. With so many different players, it comes as no surprise that heritage formation is rife with contestations (Byrne 1991). Heritage production always implies statements as to which histories matter (and which do not), as well as statements as to who pertains to the collective (and who does not): All heritage is someone’s heritage and therefore logically not someone else’s: the original meaning of an inheritance implies the existence of disinheritance and by extension any creation of heritage from the past disinherits someone completely or partially, actively or potentially. This disinheritance may be unintentional, temporary, of trivial importance, limited in its effects and concealed; or it may be long-term, widespread, intentional, important and obvious. (Ashworth and Tunbridge 1996)

In multicultural and multireligious societies, minority groups may feel unaddressed by dominant heritage formations, and challenge the canons of cultural truth put forward by the heritage agencies of the state (see Markus Balkenhol and Ruy Blanes, this volume). The examples are

Introduction 9

many, and there are no uniform stories to be told as to how contestations take shape and where they lead: in the Netherlands, many citizens of Afro-Caribbean descent (and others) vehemently reject as ‘racist’ the black-face figure of Zwarte Piet (Black Peet), linked to the traditional Dutch celebration of Sinterklaas (Saint Nicholas), a tradition that was recently added to the National Heritage List.14 The Arab population of Jerusalem resents Israeli excavation practices, which cast Jerusalem as ‘The City of David’ (Abu El-Haj 2001).15 In Ghana, the state policy of ‘Sankofaism’, which postulates the importance of the various local cultural and religious traditions for national heritage and identity, is heavily contested by the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement, which has become a major voice in the public sphere and questions the authority of the state in framing national cultural heritage (De Witte 2004; Meyer 2004; see also De Witte, this volume; Woets, this volume). In the Muslim world, to give another example of such religiously informed contestations, radical Islamist groups deny any value to legacies of pre-Islamic civilizations, such as the Buddha statues in the Bamyan valley in Afghanistan, demolished by the Islamist Taliban, but now being rebuilt, or to the ancient monuments in Mesopotamia and Syria. States, in turn, may reject alternative heritage designations put forward by claimants from minority groups. Here one might think of initiatives in South Africa by the Afrikaner Weerstand Beweging, an extreme right-wing group of Afrikaans-speaking whites, to list the home of their murdered leader, Eugène Terre’Blanche, as heritage. As the volume by De Jong and Rowlands (2007) shows, ‘alternative imaginaries of memory’ in West Africa may challenge and at the same time be partly recognized by state policies. The book offers several examples highlighting the contestations imbued in the objectification and recognition of alternative heritage forms, as is the case with the heritagization of the Osun sacred grove in Osogo (Nigeria), shaped by artist Susanne Wenger (Probst 2007, 2011), or the ‘re-enchantment’ of the Senegambian Kankurang masquerade as a ‘new masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity’ (De Jong 2007: 161). Contestations of heritage may also concern questions regarding to whom historical legacies pertain. During the conflicts of the 1990s in Bosnia-Herzegovina, for instance, the medieval gravestones called stec´ci, which lay scattered over the country’s green hills, were subjected to intense nationalist contestations and political instrumentalizations by all religious-ethnic groups – Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosniaks – as pertaining exclusively to their history (Lovrenovic 2002). In contemporary Spain, the way one chooses to narrate the famous Mesquita in Cordoba – a mosque turned into a church – or the Alhambra in Granada is ‘a deeply political act’, as it always implies statements over the historical presence of Islam in Europe (Ruggles 2011: 51; Hirschkind 2016), whereas in Belfast, Northern Ireland, attempts by the government to clear the city

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of ‘sectarian’ murals, so as to be able to ‘re-imagine the community’, only revealed a multitude of agents claiming exclusive ownership as to what the murals represent (Hartnett 2011). The latter example already hints at yet another contentious dimension of heritage formation: the debates over the value of what has been called ‘undesirable heritage’ or ‘difficult heritage’, such as fascist architecture in Germany (MacDonald 2010) and Italy (Arthurs 2010); socialist architecture in post-socialist societies (Turnbridge 1984; Lizon 1996; Light 2000); or the legacies of the slave trade and colonial rule in the Global South (Henderson 2001; Daehnke 2007). Hotly debated as we write are demands to remove statues of the mining magnate, racist politician and founder of the southern African territory of Rhodesia, Cecil Rhodes, in South Africa (#RhodesMustFall) and of Confederate army general Robert E. Lee, who commanded the Virginia state forces in favour of slavery in the American civil war, in the Southern United States (#LeeMustFall). Where such contestation of heritage formations leads differs, again, from case to case. Sometimes, heritage formations merely produce indifference, as they simply fail to have sufficient impact to stir the passions. Sometimes, public debates result in amendments made to the heritage item. Thus, in the Netherlands many now argue that the blackness of the aforementioned figure of Black Peet needs to be re-narrated as being the result of the fact that he delivers his presents via the chimney (thus undoing the racial ground of his blackness), whereas others have suggested repainting his face in all possible colours. In yet other cases, contestation leads to the destruction of cultural heritage, as witnessed during the Cultural Revolution in China; and, more recently, in the sphere of influence of the so-called Islamic State (IS), where ancient, non-Islamic or ‘pseudo-Islamic’ legacies – situated peacefully in the Muslim world for centuries – have been demolished. Time and again, Islamists explicitly made the point in mediatized performances that they did not wish to partake in the particular historical narratives these objects and sites help to produce as cherished icons of ‘world heritage’ that arguably underpin a particular Westerncentred historicity. Rather they chose to destroy them in spectacularly violent iconoclastic acts. A video, brought into circulation by the IS, shows bearded men in an archaeological museum in Mosul destroying copies of ancient statues (the originals are kept in museums outside of the region, many in Europe) and of original, massive sculptures in urban space dating to Assyrian times, with sledgehammers and drills. One of the perpetrators declared that ‘these statues and idols, these artefacts, if God has ordered their removal, they became worthless to us even if they are worth billions of dollars’.16 Western commentators compared the destruction of ‘history’s treasures’ to the atrocious beheadings of living people: ‘The beheadings, this time were performed with hammer and drill, not sword or knife – for the victims were made of stone, not flesh’, as a journalist of The Economist (5 March 2015) put it.

Introduction 11

The latter example suggests that the felt urge to destroy consecrated heritage sites is not necessarily a sign of heritage failing to speak: it may well be a sign of it speaking too successfully. The iconoclasts in Mosul and Palmyra knew perfectly well how global mainstream public opinion would respond to their actions; they intended their acts to work as a provocation (just as they perceived, conversely, the publication of offensive, blasphemous cartoons as an intentional provocation of Muslims). This contestation raises another interesting point requiring reflection. Although different collectives may not agree on what constitutes heritage, they are all increasingly versed in its vocabularies. A concrete example from the Netherlands may clarify this point. In 2012, in the Frisian village of Burum (the Netherlands), a 225-year-old windmill called the Windlust burned to the ground. With the help of the insurance money and generous gifts by the local population, the windmill was rebuilt – an exact replica of the old mill. Many villagers expressed joy and satisfaction over the fact that the skyline of their beloved Burum was restored. The characteristic building towered over their homes again; the void in their community had been filled. When the villagers asked the Dutch state to continue the funding that had covered the maintenance and exploitation of the windmill before the fire, however, the state institution for monuments, the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, declined the request. Officials from the Agency argued that there ‘was nothing old about the new mill’, and they refused to recognize the reconstructed windmill as cultural heritage. Four charred beams, which had been used to mark the fire as part of the Windlust history, were ignored. Arguments between villagers and the agency went back and forth. Villagers stated that, during its 225-year-old history, the mill had passed many renovations and interventions, pointing out that certainly not everything inside the original mill had been 225 years old. They also offered to bring back in some more of the charred leftovers of the original windmill, ‘if that is what makes the difference!’ Yet the agency did not move its position. In front of TV cameras, and fully confident in his expertise, an official stated that ‘this Windlust is a copy. It is not authentic’. In an interview, the Dutch minister of culture insisted that ‘the essence of a monument is its authenticity, and this is not authentic. What will we do when Rembrandt’s Nightwatch is destroyed by fire? We wouldn’t then call the replica the real Nightwatch, would we?’ (Volkskrant, 8 September 2014) It was only after fierce lobbying by the villagers, all the way up to the national parliament, that the Cultural Heritage Agency found itself forced to give in, and the Windlust was declared a rijksmonument. In a jubilant tone, the local newspaper reported on the victory. ‘This struggle wasn’t about finances’, the local journalist wrote, ‘this was about recognition’ (Leeuwarder Courant 7 October 2014). The minister of culture, being a good sport, travelled to Burum to bring the news personally, and declared

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that, although she still considered the Windlust to be a replica, she appreciated that, through their concerted actions, the villagers had ‘given the windmill back its soul’. What the case brings to the fore is that the notion of heritage, in the contemporary Netherlands, is firmly established as a conceptual framework to assess, evaluate and act upon material and immaterial remnants of the past. Clearly, the concerns of the villagers and state officials differed. The villagers were driven by an ill-articulated but emotionally powerful concern to keep the Burum as they knew it intact. Having lived all of their lives under the shadow of the mill, without it, Burum was no longer Burum for them. The officials of the heritage agency argued and acted on the basis of an academic, professional and experience-distant understanding of cultural heritage as ‘historic legacy’ and ‘the Dutch landscape’.17 Both villagers and state officials, however, articulated their concerns in terms of ‘heritage’ (erfgoed). One might say that ‘heritage’ has become a discursive realm that privileges certain vocabularies and certain modes of argumentation. The Burum villagers – or at least those who took it upon themselves to fight the case – knew that they could not simply lament the loss of a skyline that made them feel at home and with which they identified. However much that sense of loss may have been what moved them into action, they were aware that they had to play another game: the game of argumentation. Stepping into the particular historical argumentation of the discourse on heritage, they produced arguments with which to persuade their opponents and the public at large: ‘from the very beginning, the Windlust was subject to innovations and renewals’. ‘It was never an object frozen in time’. This discourse on heritage, says Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, is strongly marked by its birth in the museum (1998). She notes that heritage producers tend to extend museological values and methods – ‘collection, documentation, preservation, presentation, evaluation and interpretation’ – to living persons, their knowledge, practices, artefacts, social worlds and life spaces (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998; see also Balkenhol, this volume). On the receiving end of heritage – the performers, ritual specialists, and artisans whose ‘cultural assets’ become heritage through this process – she notices that heritage formation changes their relation with those assets: what used to be habitual and taken-for-granted is now singled out as having special meaning, and being worthy of special attention. As in a museum, living culture is put on a pedestal, inducing the respectful demeanour demanded of the museum visitor and the care with which objects are handled by museum staff. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett points out another dimension of heritage that is reminiscent of the museum: The power of heritage is precisely that it is curated, which is why heritage is more easily harmonized with human rights and democratic values than is culture. Hence, UNESCO stipulates that only those aspects of culture that are compatible with such values can be considered for world heritage designation. (2004: 1)

Introduction 13

Besides the evident influences of the museum, the discourse on heritage is also deeply academic. Due to the lively exchange between academics and heritage professionals, who themselves are mostly academically trained, heritage nominations are cast in the language of scientific research. Academic standards of research such as sound methodology, accuracy of report and a stress on the facticity of findings make their appearance everywhere in processes of heritage formation. The evaluations of objects under consideration are thus given the weight of academic prestige. The bureaucratization of the process of heritage formation, with its endless paper trails, is another dimension that might be mentioned here (see Adinolfi, this volume). Heritage scholar Ciraj Rassool, however, has rightly pointed out that the relations between academia and the heritage industry are not without problems. Many academic historians, he states, sniff their nose about heritage claims with regard to the truth of the past, saying that ‘at worst, it constitutes a terrain of inaccuracy and myth-making, whose inadequacies and errors can be detected by the professional, armed with the necessary disciplinary training in the canon’ (Rassool 2001: 44). This somewhat haughty dismissal is all the more questionable in the light of the evidence of human remains in museums and medical institutions in Europe’s former imperial cities that are now being reclaimed and repatriated; this ‘bone memory’ calls for a thorough uncovering not only of the complicity of physical anthropology and archaeology in profiling of race typologies in the past, but also of the complex role of scholarly disciplines in processes of exploitation and subordination, the material traces of which are at the centre of current heritage claims (Rassool 2015). Another prominent feature of the contemporary discourse on heritage concerns the frequent references to the notion of ‘authenticity’. As these references are immediately relevant to our investigation of how heritage formations, while clearly fabricated, are nonetheless embraced as ­repositories of essence and truth, they merit more extensive discussion.

Politics of Authentication Authenticity is the sine qua non of heritage formations in our time. Both historical artefacts and immaterial historical legacies (traditions, rituals, performances, crafts) have to be ‘authenticated’ to qualify for the heritage label. Part of this authentication is realized through scientific research, which verifies whether (or to what extent) the heritage item is ‘really’ what claimants have made of it in their narrations. In these inquiries, technical, historical and anthropological knowledges are mobilized to make clearcut distinctions between ‘factual evidence’ and ‘mere fabulation’. This was the basis on which Dutch heritage officials disclaimed the authenticity of the reconstructed Burum windmill: there was nothing old, and nothing original about it, and it was therefore not ‘authentic’.18 Yet, the example also showed that in the contemporary world, authentication entails much

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more than an assertion of the true identity of a cultural object with scientifically appropriate evidence and methods. For the villagers were not the least disheartened by the arguments of the heritage officials, and insisted that the mill they had rebuilt was the one and only Windlust. In the end, even the minister of culture acknowledged that, through their concerted actions, the villagers had given this replica its ‘soul’. The particular mode of authentication that comes to the fore in these latter observations is grounded in the identification of a subject with the heritage object, and follows a very particular way of apprehending truthfulness or genuineness, which can be traced back to the Romantic era. As a key term of modernity, authenticity forms a ‘container which is used in modern society so as to negotiate what is taken as genuine and false, good and bad, beautiful and ugly’ (Rehling and Paulmann 2016: 99).19 Many authors have argued that current notions of authenticity are derived from the Romantic revolt against the ‘disengaged rationality’ of Enlightenment thought, and the fragmentation and disenchantment of the world to which it had led (Taylor 1989; Bendix 1997; Guignon 2006; Fillitz and Saris 2013). The Romantic Movement rejected analytical truth-finding procedures whereby the observer was ‘set over against a world of objects that are to be known and manipulated’ (Guignon 2006: 42). 20 Instead, it sought to undo the divide between the knowing subject and the world, and restore ‘the primal unity and wholeness in life’ that had been lost (Guignon 2006: 42). True knowing, in the Romantic mode, was grounded in the idea of an experiential ‘resonance’ between subject and object (Taylor 1989: 301). One of the iconic images of the Romantic era – the painting Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer by Caspar David Friedrich (1818)  – forcefully evokes this idea. The painting shows a lonely hiker standing on a mountaintop, taking in the wild mountainous landscape in front of him. He is portrayed from behind: the wind plays with his hair, with his elegant coat, as well as with the shreds of foggy clouds in the depths below. Friedrich has depicted this lonely hiker not as a figure taken out of the world and put in front of it so as to be able to study it from a distance (as in the detached Enlightenment procedures of truth-finding through experiment and reasoning), but as a figure that seeks to open himself up to the world, to thus experience the resonance between his most inner feelings and the landscape. The hiker finds himself reconnected with the world in the realization that world and self are ‘made of the same stuff’: his inner moods and experiences are the landscape, just as the mountains and winds are his inner moods. Authenticity, in the Romantic mode, is this desire for the undoing of the divide between self and world. The sensation that self and world are ‘made of the same stuff’ immediately recalls the kinds of experiences many heritage formations seek to produce. Like the lonely hiker, visitors are invited to open themselves up to the historical legacy, and experience themselves and the castle,

Introduction 15

the shipwreck or the windmill as ‘one and the same’, ‘made of the same stuff’. The fact that these modes of address are found in heritage sites the world over, including places that can hardly be characterized as direct heirs to the Romantic legacy, testifies to the reappraisal of Romantic notions of authenticity as part of the category of heritage. Importantly, the emphasis placed on authenticity in UNESCO heritage discourse and policy is relatively recent. Tracing its genealogy in a highly illuminating (German language) article, Michael Falser explains that the Venice Charter (e.g. the International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites) of 1964 only mentioned authenticity twice. It was only in 1977 that authenticity became a central criterion for evaluating whether a particular cultural form could be recognized as world heritage. The Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention include a ‘Test of Authenticity’ (§9), stating: The property should meet the test of authenticity in design, materials, workmanship and setting; authenticity does not limit consideration to original form and structure but includes all subsequent modifications and additions, over the course of time, which in themselves possess artistic or historical values. (quoted in Falser 2015: 34)

Between 1977 and 2013, this document was reworked twenty-five times and the relevance of authenticity and integrity as key values was stressed. In this process, the ‘Conference on Authenticity’ that took place in 1994 in Nara, Japan, at the instigation of UNESCO and the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), was of key importance. It extended the ‘Test of Authenticity’ with the intention to move ‘from a Eurocentric approach to a post-modern position characterized by recognition of cultural relativism’ (quoted in Falser 2015: 36). Twenty years later, in Florence in 2014, the NARA+20 conference ‘On Heritage Practices, Cultural Values, and the Concept of Authenticity’ called for local and global understandings and values attributed to authenticity to be taken into account in the UNESCO definition of World Heritage (Falser 2015: 37). As Falser argues, this opened the door for processes of cultural essentialization and provincialization that, in legitimizing cultural difference, ironically tended to echo longstanding stereotypes. Taking into account the global diffusion and operation of heritage regimes and the increasing emphasis on authenticity, our prime concern is to grasp the way(s) in which subjects become emotionally and sensually entangled with heritage objects (or do not). In order to do so, we need to move beyond the Romantic vocabulary of authenticity that informs scholarly and policy discourses about culture and heritage, and pay attention to the way contemporary heritage regimes (Bendix 2013) organize ‘the cultural production of the real’ (Van de Port 2011). We envision two possible routes into this theme. One is to unpack the theoretical black box of identification so as to gain a better insight into the dense trafficking

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of emotions, fantasies and desires between subjects and heritage objects. The second involves an exploration of the aesthetics of persuasion, which brings out the pivotal role of materiality and the senses in the making of heritage. Both discussions will bring us closer to an understanding as to how the experiential and the conceptual merge, to produce in the subject that ‘sense of essence’ that lies at the heart of heritage formations. Our basic proposition is that a sense of authenticity as an essence is evoked in beholders through shared sensations and experiences with regard to forms of cultural heritage.

Modes of Entanglement: Subjectivity and Identification in Heritage Formations ‘Identification’, says William Mazzarella, ‘is the process by which the self recognizes itself in something that is alien to itself’ (2004: 356), and he urges researchers to open their eyes to the existential given that we come to be who we are through this ‘detour’. For Mazzarella, there is something inherently alienating in identification. It is like standing in front of the mirror and realizing that what one is looking at is an image, not one’s ‘self’. Identification is intrinsically relational. Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper (2000), in a much-cited article on the centrality of identification in processes of self- and world-making, make a useful analytical distinction between ‘identifying as something’ and ‘identifying with something’. The first mode refers to a cognitive operation: people, objects or practices are intellectually recognized as fitting a certain description or belonging to a certain category (2000: 17). In this mode, one identifies oneself (or an other) as pertaining to ‘the Albanians’, ‘the Nation’, ‘Islam’, ‘the working class’ or, indeed, that image in the mirror. The second mode refers to what they call the ‘psychodynamics’ of identification, which involves ‘identifying oneself emotionally with another person, category or collectivity’ (Brubaker and Cooper 2000: 17). One might characterize this second mode of identification as a form of ‘empathic imagination’ (see Oksenberg Rorty 2006) or mimesis (see Taussig 1993), for here, identification implies a carrying oneself over to that with which one identifies, to the point of becoming that something. Given our attempt to understand the entanglement of subjects with forms of cultural heritage, we need to explore this second mode of identification further. The popular ‘genealogy TV show’ Who Do You Think You Are? offers a good example that spotlights how this merging of oneself with a larger narrative that is incorporated into one’s biography may occur on the level of personal experience. The fact that this takes place on television indicates the important role of media in framing modalities of the search for a deep, grounded and ‘authentic’ self (see also De Witte, this volume): heritage is always subject to framing and mediation. In this show, celebrities, assisted by a research team, reconstruct their family tree, so as to better understand

Introduction 17

‘who they are, and where they come from’. In one episode, viewers follow Jerome Bettis, a retired African-American football player. The voice-over introduces Bettis’ probing of the past as ‘a search for a long-lost ancestor, which brings him closer to his family’s link to slavery’. The names that are dug up in different archives and civil registers in the state of Kentucky are identified as Bettis’ forefathers. What drives the show, however, is not the intellectual recognition of certain people as Bettis’ ancestors; it is Bettis’ identification with some of these people, and for this to happen, the producers of the show provide him with facts that allow for narrative elaboration. The first finding concerns the ‘rebellious’ great-grandfather, called Burnett, who had left his wife and children, but also had had the courage to take his white employer to court after the man had beaten him with a stick in the workplace (and as the historian tells Bettis: a black man taking a white man to court was no mean feat in the American South of the late nineteenth century). The second finding concerns Bettis’ great-great grandfather, called Abe, who sued a railroad company for the physical harm he had suffered when hit by a train. The third finding concerns the fact that this Abe was born a slave, and sold at the age of ten after the death of his masters. In all of these archival revelations, Bettis is being invited to see himself reflected in these figures of the past, to recognize that he and they are ‘one and the same’. Bettis takes up this invitation wholeheartedly, and over and over again he reports how his own personality traits and ways of being match those of these distant historical figures. Reflecting on the actions of his great-grandfather he states: Wow! So he was a bit of a rebel by the looks of it. So, this really helps me, for with the divorce that we saw earlier, coupled with this rumour that he was a trouble-rouser, I was starting to develop a negative perception. And now I don’t think that applies. I think he was a strong-willed African-American man in a time that you really could not be a strong-willed African-American man.

The discovery that Abe had been sold at an auction at the age of ten, thus being separated from his parents, visibly moves Bettis, who is the father of children that age. Bettis is then taken to the very estate where Abe had lived and worked until he was sold. This is how he reflects on that moment. Standing there on that land, and knowing what happened there, I understood what my family had to go through … I definitely think that some of the strength in the Bogard family was born on that day, on that field, when my great-great grandfather Abe was sold. Because at that point he had to grow up, and be a man, and that is a very frightening and difficult thing to do at that age. But my great-great grandfather, he did it! And that helped to shape the life he lived, with that no compromising, never-give-up attitude that he had. I was so proud to have Bogard blood running through my veins! It was so special.21

What this example brings to the fore is the way in which differences between Bettis and his forebears are constantly dissolved, and they actually

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become one. This merging occurs at the level of experience, and is mediated via material items, for the archival documents that Bettis is presented with are, at the moment of his encounter with them, the persons to which they refer. As we see Bettis gazing at the somewhat shaky ‘X’ with which illiterate Abe signed his complaint against the railroad company, we realize that for Bettis, that scribbled sign is Abe. Just as when we see Bettis standing on that nondescript, rainy field outside Paducah, Kentucky, we realize that this site is the agony of young Abe and his parents. Such merging, in ‘identification with’, is common in reports of people’s relation with personal and collective heritage objects. In Trouble with Strangers (2009), Terry Eagleton discusses this human capacity to merge with something or someone other in many of its manifold manifestations. Borrowing from a Lacanian vocabulary, he describes this capacity as ‘the imaginary’, and many of the instances he sums up are immediately recognizable: the phenomenon called transitivism, in which we duck away when someone in a film gets hit; the sense of ‘communion’ with the object world that occurs when we stand ‘captivated’ by something; the ‘magnetism’ with which we may be drawn to certain objects; the ‘mimetic desire to merge with the world’ and the fleeting moments when indeed ‘subject and object, self and world, seem to be tailor-made for one another’ (2009: 10): the sensation that the world is part of ‘our own inner substance, centred upon it, spontaneously given to it, leashed to it by an internal bond’ (2009: 11). This human capacity to overcome the differences introduced by language and the symbolic order is not only activated in mystical practices (where it is easily recognized), but, as Eagleton argues, is a necessary and inextricable part of the way people become subjectively entangled with the worlds of meaning they inhabit. For it is the capacity to blend oneself into the object world that connects us with that world, allowing the subject ‘to rest assured that society lays special claim to it, singles it out as uniquely precious and addresses it, so to speak, by its name’ (Eagleton 2009: 11). Trying to further qualify the ‘imaginary’ register of identification, Eagleton points out that this kind of identification is pre-reflective.22 ‘It is as though we relate to things directly by our sensations – as though our very flesh and feelings become a subtle medium of communication, without the blundering interposition of language and reflection’ (2009: 10). Although he calls these identifications ‘comfortable delusions’, Eagleton also acknowledges that there is a plurality of ways of knowing, encompassing both cognitive and emotional registers. To return to the example of Jerome Bettis: rather than unmasking his imaginary identifications as ‘mere fantasies’ (and thus privileging the symbolic register as the realm of truth), the point is to acknowledge that fantasies are simply another mode of apprehending the world. What Eagleton and many others help us to see is how people cultivate their capacity to sense the world, attune to their felt relationship to it, step into their fantasies and thus arrive at a point where

Introduction 19

the truth or fakeness of things is no longer relevant, and things simply are the way they make themselves felt (see also Marleen de Witte’s concept of heritage as ‘corpo-real’). We would like to stress that for us, calling attention to the reality effects of imaginary identifications does not imply a celebratory stance towards them. Across Europe we witness the rise of identitarian movements and populist stances which vest old nationalist tropes with affective energy and articulate highly exclusivist apprehensions of the world that are experienced as real (and claim to be more real than the picture of the world projected by mainstream politicians and dominant media). Our concern is to get a deeper understanding of the processes through which people develop such a sense of the real, and the role of cultural heritage therein.

Aesthetics of Persuasion As noted above, authenticity is not intrinsic to cultural forms – in the sphere of heritage and beyond – but is a quality attributed to such forms in particular sociopolitical configurations. It is one of the salient ironies of our time that the concern with authenticity, whether from a critical scholarly stance or whether fuelled by a desire for the ‘real thing’, is rooted in a deep insecurity about the lurking gap between reality and its representation. Having no ontological grounding in an objective outside reality, the authenticity of a cultural form can only be achieved through procedures of representation and certification that profile it as present and real to its beholders. In this sense, the authentic is not given – though often posing as such – but rather, is a result of a careful ‘cultural construction of the real’ through which particular cultural forms and their beholders become sensorially, emotionally and mentally entangled. In this endeavour, aesthetics plays a prime role. As Wolfgang Funk, Florian Groß and Irmtraud Huber put it poignantly in their introduction to their volume Aesthetics of Authenticity: For if reality remains fundamentally inaccessible, authenticity can only manifest itself through its representations, and subjective aesthetics becomes the only means by which the gap between the real (whatever that may be) and the symbolic can possibly be approached. Any aesthetic analysis of authenticity, understood in the etymological sense of ‘aesthetic’ as perceiving something with one’s senses, is always already constructivist as it foregrounds the individual’s sensual response in the establishment of authenticity as a category. (2012: 12)

There is a strong resonance between the approach of these authors, who focus on ‘medial constructions of the real’ in the sphere of literature, film and art, and our approach to understand how formations of cultural heritage are, to invoke Clifford Geertz (1973), vested with an ‘aura of factuality’ (see also Meyer, Roodenburg and Van de Port 2008). We all take as a starting point an understanding of representation as a world-making

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practice in its own right, rather than a mere reference to an unrepresentable exterior reality. By virtue of having the capacity to represent, humans are able to make and unmake worlds, albeit, as Marx (1999 [1852]) observed, not under conditions of their own choosing but in historically and culturally situated settings. The key issue pursued in this volume, then, concerns attempts to orchestrate shared sensations and experiences in authenticating a heritage form as an essence rather than a mere construction. The point is that a sense of authenticity as an essence is effected through a particular aesthetics to which it owes its reality effects. At stake is a dynamic and performative take on authenticity that locates it in the sensorial, emotional and intellectual relations that ensue between particular people and heritage items. The fact that people, as outlined in the previous section, need to be enticed, captivated, convinced and mobilized to see such forms as their heritage: something that belongs to them and that underpins their belonging, and hence is part of their identity, forms the backdrop against which we would like to unpack the term ‘aesthetics of persuasion’. Before turning to the issue of persuasion and the approach to heritage formation that ensues from it, it is necessary to briefly address the complex relation between aesthetics and society. Born as a discipline in eighteenthcentury Germany, aesthetics, as understood by influential philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762), was devoted to the study of the production of knowledge through the senses and emotions. In Baumgarten’s sense, aesthetics was the science of perception and sensation. Building upon the old, Greek dualism of aisthesis and logos, he took aesthetics as analogous to reason, understood as another, albeit inferior, way of relating to and knowing the world through the ‘lower’ senses. In so doing, he built upon Aristotle’s conception of aisthesis outlined in On the Soul, which designates ‘our corporeal capability on the basis of a power given in our psyche to perceive objects in the world via our five different sensorial modes … and at the same time a specific constellation of sensations as a whole’ (Meyer and Verrips 2008: 21; see also Verrips 2006). As a philosophical discipline, following Baumgarten (1750) and Kant (1790), aesthetics was concerned with theorizing beauty, art and the role of the senses in gaining knowledge. 23 With the rise of the modern social sciences in the early twentieth century, there was little room for the pursuit of aesthetics as a discipline. As pointed out by the cultural sociologist Andreas Reckwitz (2008, 2015), mainstream social theory operated under the aegis of an Ernüchterungskur (curative process of sobering up, from an enchanted pre-Enlightenment world) that characterized modern society as disenchanted, objectified (versachlicht), rationalized and subject to functional differentiation, in which aesthetics was confined to the subsystem of art. This focus on the ‘rational’ yielded a mainstream of scholarly meta-narratives and approaches within social science that saw no significant relevance for aesthetics in theorizing

Introduction 21

and researching the social.24 The focus on acts, rules and regulations marginalized the levels of experience, embodiment and sensation, confining their study to the discipline of psychology. Alternative appraisals of the sensorial, affective and corporeal dimension of experience and their constitutive role for social action articulated in the margins of the sociological mainstream – in phenomenology, pragmatism and philosophical anthropology – remained peripheral to the grand narrative of rationalization (Reckwitz 2015: 18–20). As Reckwitz aptly described it: In this classical sociological ‘grand-récit’, the aesthetic as the sphere of intensified sensory perception and of the affects, of the creative shaping of experience beyond practical action and the disruption of meaning in cognitive-normative systems tends to appear as the Other of Modernity, but in no case as its social center. (2008: 260)25

A major transition occurred in the 1980s, with the rise of postmodern theory and in the aftermath of practice theories as developed by Pierre Bourdieu (1977). As pointed out in the beginning of this section, once the realization has taken hold that our access to the world is mediated, and that the body and the senses are central to these mediations, it makes sense to take into account the aesthetic dimension of political, social and cultural practices (see also Meyer 2009, 2016). Importantly, as Reckwitz (2015), drawing on Rancière (2006, 2009) stresses, aesthetic practices are historically situated, rather than universal, and operate within specific regimes that shape subjects sensorially, emotionally and mentally. His proposition to extend the study of social practice to include aesthetics is well taken: Practices do not only organize action, they also organize experience, affects and sensory perception in their culturally specific ways: via the sensitization of particular senses in favor of others, via a routine invocation of particular mental-somatic states of experience, via the evocation of particular sensations as well as calling upon ‘affective-neutral’ common sense. For sociological analysis, it is crucial to not see phenomenologically ‘inward’ states, to not account for perception, experience and affect ‘psychologically’, but instead to model them as components of cultural practices. (2008: 278) 26

Our appreciation of aesthetics as a key dimension of political, social and cultural practices is located in this scholarly project of overcoming the rift between aesthetics and the social sciences. As anthropologists, we have long been critical of – and puzzled by – the neglect of the senses in mainstream social science theory and have sought to develop alternative concepts, such as the notion of ‘aesthetic formation’ (Meyer 2009; see also Van de Port 2009), which allows for an empirically grounded study of how assemblages of people and cultural forms emerge and are sustained. 27 The point here is that aesthetics can no longer be regarded as a domain confined to philosophy and the arts that sociocultural research may

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comfortably neglect. Aesthetics is enmeshed with power and vice versa, in the sense that: Structures of power must become structures of feeling and the name for this mediation from property to propriety is the aesthetic. If politics and aesthetics are deeply at one, it is because pleasurable conduct is the index of successful social hegemony, self-delight the very mark of social submission. What matters in aesthetics is not art but this whole project of reconstructing the human subject from the inside, informing its subtlest affections and bodily responses with its law which is not a law. (Eagleton 1989: 78)

In other words, modes of sensuous perception, feeling and cognition emerge within specific aesthetic-political regimes or aesthetic formations with their particular ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière 2006, see also Meyer 2015b: 19–21). One of the guiding propositions of this volume is that the turn to aesthetics and the senses is tremendously fruitful for the study of heritage. Such a new focus moves our inquiries beyond a mere concern with the construction and framing of heritage, and opens up new alleys to understand the processes through which forms of cultural heritage, as powerful ‘sensational forms’ (Meyer 2006, 2014) that convey a sense of direct presence of the past, become appreciated and appropriated, as if they were real essences. Meyer initially developed the notion of sensational form in her research on religion to account for the genesis of a sense of divine presence amongst believers in practices of religious mediation. In so far as heritage is also geared to re-presenting valued items from the past or offering privileged access to it, the notion of ‘sensational form’ may well be extended to this domain (see Stengs, this volume). The notion of sensational form may be helpful in exploring the politics of authentication through the lens of the senses and aesthetic practices, by which forms of cultural heritage appear as enshrining an indisputable essence for their beholders. The formation of heritage, as this volume shows, can fruitfully be analysed as a political-aesthetic and material process, and, by the same token, can offer a privileged case to study how essences are fabricated and made real in processes of world-making. Since heritage is not given, but has to be constituted through the cultural production of the real, it has no natural owners. Situated within specific aesthetic formations, the making of heritage is not limited to the material construction and profiling of particular sites and items; it also involves the constant concern to resonate with and deepen particular ‘structures of feeling’ and distributed sensibilities in relation to these sites and items. Such sensibilities arise through particular, more or less streamlined, sensorial, emotional and mental engagements with material forms, be it valuable objects, buildings, sites and spaces. The past is present in and through such concrete items (Stordalen and Naguib 2015), which may be (or may not yet be) framed as heritage. In this volume, attention is paid to the affective-­sensorial relations between humans and material heritage

Introduction 23

forms, questioning the ‘agency’ of such forms in relation to their beholders (Latour 2005) as well as the longstanding human-object entanglements (e.g. Hodder 2012) that are encapsulated in forms of cultural heritage and shape their aesthetic appeal and effects. This appeal does not only pertain to cherished heritage forms but also to gloomy remnants of past violent regimes, such as the Voortrekkersmonument in Pretoria that iconizes Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid (Jethro, this volume). So, it is by being enveloped in a political-aesthetic regime that a form of cultural heritage ceases to be merely an object on display ‘out there’ in the world but becomes an embodied part of a lived experience (see also Svašek 2007, 2016) – a ‘second nature’ – that conveys a strong aura of authenticity and a sense of essence. The fact that this process of embodiment is far from taken for granted, but requires specific modes of address and specific styles and designs that are appreciated as persuasive and binding, calls for a detailed investigation of the ‘aesthetics of persuasion’ through which people relate to particular forms of cultural heritage. As heritage is not given naturally, persuasion is a necessity. This involves both the mobilization of all kinds of devices, narratives and material forms on the part of heritage builders to persuade its addressees and indulgence in self-persuasion – the preparedness to identify with such forms emotionally and mentally – on the part of those addressees. Persuasion operates partly on a conscious level but also through repetitive exposure, in the sense of a pervasion of people’s senses and bodies by virtue of being part of a particular political-aesthetic environment. 28 In recent years, heritage industries have increasingly invested in profiling cultural heritage forms as an ‘Experience’ that speaks to the senses and emotions and that lends itself to being easily appropriated. As the examples offered in this volume show, this is a complex process that may or may not be successful. People may refuse to be captivated, declining to identify with or embrace a heritage form (see contributions by Woets, Stengs, Bakker and Jethro in this volume) or may strongly contest the official recognition of a particular form as heritage, as is the case with the heritagization of acarajé, a food item closely tied to Candomblé, which evokes negative responses on the part of Pentecostals (see Reinhardt, this volume). As a rhetorical technique employed to convince listeners without direct force, using just appropriate words, persuasion has been met with suspicion since classical antiquity. In his famous treatise, The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric (written around 330 bc, see translation by Freese 1926), which systematizes earlier attempts to understand the power of oratory to win people’s minds by words, Aristotle defined rhetoric as ‘the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion in reference to any subject whatever’ (Aristotle, trans. Freese 1926: 15). 29 His foundational ideas can still be fruitfully applied to public oratory in our time. Discourse in the public sphere, rather than conforming to Habermas’ ideal of communicative action based on purely rational argumentation, is situated in an arena

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of mobilization. Diverse actors and instances – including the sphere of heritage – call for attention, seeking to mobilize and persuade others. With trust in the ­possibility of stating truth and describing the world objectively having lost currency, scholars show a strong interest in the world-making powers of words and, by implication, in forms of rhetorical persuasion and pervasion. Exploring the psychological and ethical dimension of speaking and listening, Aristotle focused on how an orator seeks to convince listeners of his trustworthiness by putting them into a certain frame of mind. In this context, he discusses questions of style and arrangement of speech, emphasizing that ‘it is not sufficient to know what one ought to say, but one must also know how to say it, and this largely contributes to making the speech appear of a certain character’ (Aristotle 1926: 345). Importantly, he noted that style conveys emotion, making the content of the speech appear credible.30 Moreover, the appearance of artificiality must be concealed, and that of naturalness maintained, ‘for that which is natural persuades, but the artificial does not’ (Aristotle 1926: 353). Persuasiveness, in this understanding, is not intrinsic to that which is spoken about, but a quality realized via speech that reaches the listeners and appears natural. We find an analysis grounded on a view of rhetoric as a practice that links speaker and listeners through persuasion compelling, because it takes into account the coexistence of ethics, emotions and logic. In our view, rhetoric can be extended towards broader modes of expression than oratory alone, involving media such as radio, film, television, and the internet, and a broader set of aesthetic strategies that seek to persuade listeners. Forms of rhetorical persuasion operate within particular political-aesthetic regimes that appeal to the senses, emotions and intellect and hence are central to the making of culture and heritage (see Meyer and Girke 2011). With its rich array of expressive forms and the inbuilt need to captivate and convince beholders to identify, heritage is a domain par excellence for a detailed study of how the aesthetics of persuasion actually work. Successful persuasion involves a double process: first, the launching of a persuasive heritage design and, second, personal and collective practices of intense self-persuasion that assert that one is a legitimate heir to a particular cultural form from the past through which one’s own belonging achieves a deeper relief, as in the case of football player Jerome Bettis, who enthusiastically re-cognized and re-membered his great-great grandfather as part of himself and vice versa. In sum, while the concepts of politics of authentication and aesthetics of persuasion fold into each other in understanding the dynamics of heritage formation, we think that distinguishing them analytically is important in order to unpack the cultural construction of the real undertaken in these dynamics. Taking into account the aesthetics of persuasion employed to vest authorized forms of cultural heritage with authenticity is central for understanding why and how people identify with such forms as an essential

Introduction 25

part of their being in the world. The contributions to this volume explore the specific means through which forms of cultural heritage are designed in order to persuade and be appropriated, on the one hand, and how and why they come (or do not come) to be taken as credible and authentic by beholders, on the other.

This Volume There are many possible ways to organize a volume such as this one, as the texts of our contributors speak to each other across various dimensions, both thematically and regionally. We have opted for a clustering of chapters dealing with heritage formations in Brazil, on the African continent and in Europe. This provides a thick sense of the regional particularities of heritage dynamics. André Bakker discusses the case of the Pataxó Indians from Southern Bahia. For most of the twentieth century, the Pataxó came to be regarded, within a traditional ethnological canon, as an ‘acculturated’ group, being often characterized – both within and outside academia – as caboclos (‘half-breeds’) rather than Indians. Over recent decades, however, they have increasingly engaged in what they call ‘the rescue of culture’. In his chapter, Bakker focuses on the emergence and canonization of novel practices of body adornment. He identifies a mimetic leaning from the Pataxó towards the exuberant body paint, colourful feathering and piercings of Amazonian and Central-Brazilian Indian peoples, which have become icons of cultural integrity in Western imaginations. Bakker points out that such mimetic practices, which may strike readers as ‘copying’ and make-believe, echo a widely reported Amerindian ontological template: the incorporation of alterity as the critical modus operandi of Amerindian socialities. Interestingly, the case of the Pataxó also shows important modifications of this tendency: their mimetic practices do not exclude the root-oriented modes of self-making associated with modern identity politics. References to the ancestral past in the re-making of a Pataxó cultural canon play a pivotal role. Modern identity politics and Amerindian modes of incorporating alterity need not, therefore, be seen as mutually exclusive and necessarily opposed, but simultaneously at work in contexts where the authentication of Indianness is compellingly at stake. Bruno Reinhardt’s discussion of the recent heritagization of a popular Bahian street snack – a bean fritter called acarajé – reveals how the introduction of a heritage framework in such everyday practices as producing and selling food generates endless paradoxes, inconsistencies and incoherences. The acarajé, rooted in West-African cuisine and strongly associated with the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé, was widely recognized as an iconic representative of the regional cuisine and identity of the state of Bahia and the African legacy to Brazilian culture at large. The call for its heritagization followed controversies over evangelical street vendors

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selling the snack as ‘Jesus fritters’, thus trying to take the product out of the realm of Candomblé and Afro-Brazilian culture. Following the debates and arguments ‘from below’ – including the association of acarajé sellers, vendors recently converted to evangelical Christianity, scholars from the Federal University of Bahia, Candomblé terreiros, and black movement associations – Reinhardt explores the intricate entanglements of heritage and religious discourses. Interestingly, Reinhardt does not use his findings to simply unmask official heritage discourses – and their proposition of cultural authenticity – as false and untenable. Rather, he suggests that the very inconsistencies and incoherences produced by heritagization might well be part and parcel of what makes these discourses persuasive. The vitality of heritage formations might well depend on the cracks in hegemonic narrations, which allow new voices to be added to the cacophony of democracy, voices struggling to define who they are while acting upon the open-ended futures the heritage machinery safeguards. Maria Paula Adinolfi’s chapter offers a third case from Bahia, discussing the heritagization of cultural objects and practices from the Afro-Brazilian lifeworld. She observes, for example, that there is a veritable ‘heritage rush’ going on in the world of Candomblé, where many temples are vying to have their practices recognized as canonic. She discusses this development in the light of changing cultural politics in Brazil, and the way the National Historical and Artistic Heritage Institute (IPHAN) responds to these changes. Decisions to declare cultural assets as national heritage are made by IPHAN, and they are based on ‘technical’ grounds – that is, based on the ‘inherent’ artistic qualities of these assets or their ‘evident’ historical importance for the building of narratives of the nation. For a long time, the assets recognized were those connected to the Brazilian colonial past – that is, to Luso-Brazilian architecture and arts. Over recent decades, however, this situation has changed. Afro-Brazilians and indigenous peoples have sought to be included in the narration of the Brazilian nation, and demanded that their cultural assets, including many so-called ‘immaterial’ practices, be recognized and registered as ‘heritage’. While, for the state, emphasizing the immaterial aspect of such cultural practices and territories has, for many reasons, been the preferred way to accommodate Afro-Brazilian claims, Adinolfi shows how black agents have developed new ways to state and display materiality as a fundamental element of their authenticity. Duane Jethro, in his chapter ‘“Reporting the Past”: News History and the Formation of the Sunday Times Heritage Project’, addresses the role of authenticity and aesthetic sensibilities in post-apartheid heritage formation in South Africa. For the occasion of its centenary in 2006, The Sunday Times, South Africa’s most popular, independent weekly newspaper, initiated the Sunday Times Heritage Project (STHP). It consisted of thirty-six site-specific, interactive public art memorials dedicated to a variety of

Introduction 27

‘newsworthy’ historical events and public figures; an interactive website; and other informative media products. The project’s authenticity was portrayed as deriving from the popular taste of South African news consumers who had endorsed the Sunday Times. As such, the STHP was formed out of South African history cycled through the Sunday Times’ legacy of news practice and news history. Employing news values as design criteria for a post-apartheid heritage project, the Sunday Times actively blurred the lines between the apparent altruism of heritage formation and the self-interest of capitalist enterprise. Jethro shows that while the STHP did seek to update the newspaper’s brand image, it was nonetheless convincing as a heritage form because it created different forms of surplus value: economic surplus value by creating funding for the arts; cultural surplus value by expanding the spectrum of South Africa’s public heritage narratives; and civic surplus value by developing a publicly accessible, independent historical counternarrative. Overall, the STHP mediated, negotiated and contested postapartheid heritage formation through proposing new knowledge forms and through innovative material aesthetics. Ruy Llera Blanes’ chapter discusses the question of religious and cultural heritage as seen from the musseques (informal settlements) of Luanda, Angola. Luanda is a city marked in recent years by a complete overhauling of its urban planning and public architecture. Blanes sketches how aesthetic, architectural and heritage paradigms are in constant negotiation and operation in the public sphere, through tropes such as the ‘New Luanda’, the ‘Dubaization of Luanda’, etc. In stark contrast with the flashy monuments and cathedrals seen in the city’s central and more modern quarters, the architectural structures in the musseques are characterized by a seemingly unfinished, makeshift, decaying aesthetics. The Angolan ruling elite considers these buildings, and the neighbourhoods in which they can be found, to be a ‘backward’, ‘clandestine’ Luanda, doomed to succumb sooner or later to the New Luanda. But, in fact, they not only remain in place, but continue to be spaces of intense interaction and creativity. This is the case of one such neighbourhood, the ‘Republic of Palanca’, where ethnic (Bakongo), spiritual and economic processes configure a unique modality of ‘being Luandan’. Blanes argued that in places like Palanca, the transitory condition of its construction is actually an invitation towards modalities of temporal experience (from memory to expectation) that transcend the material codifications of mainstream paradigms. In fact, they often constitute politically configured heritage formations according to local understandings. From this perspective, ‘scaffolding heritage’ refers to how ‘work in progress’ constructions play a role in processes of political negotiations of legitimacy and authenticity in Angola. In her chapter ‘Corpo-Reality TV and the Authentication of African Heritage’, Marleen de Witte explores the capacity of heritage formations to seduce and capture those addressed by them. Her in-depth analysis of a weekly ‘heritage talent show’ on a Ghanaian commercial TV station

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allows her to discuss the ways in which the fashioning of tradition and the styling of the past appeal to and stimulate the senses and the body. The show featured a competition between cultural troupes from various communities in the Greater Accra Region that performed aspects of their community’s cultural heritage: town history, royal funeral rites, marriage rites, traditional dance, etc. In the week preceding the show, the young candidates studied the details of the assignment from their elders at the chief’s palace in their community and transformed the traditions into a spectacular choreography fit for television. A jury consisting of traditional spiritual leaders, Ga personalities and entertainment professionals judged their performances, but the decisive judgement came from the Ghanaian public, voting via cell-phone technology. Branded by Kasapreko, one of Ghana’s major alcoholic beverage manufacturers and sponsor for many traditional festivals, the show, and TV Africa as a whole, addresses a growing, mainly urban market for ‘African heritage’ as style. Focusing on the role of the body and the senses in underpinning the various understandings of authenticity/reality/truth that emerge from this merging of cultural heritage and contemporary TV formats, De Witte shows how the corporeal and sensorial aspects of local performance genres intersect with the spectacle and sensory appeal of reality TV in the commercial production of ‘African authenticity’. Rhoda Woets discusses creative engagements with the past in contemporary Ghanaian art. In the vibrant, globalizing art scene of Accra, where she did her research, these engagements are strikingly different from those of the pioneering generation of modern Ghanaian artists. The latter mobilized and styled an ‘African heritage’ in their artwork in the 1950s and 60s, so as to arrive at an authentic Ghanaian modern art. Contemporary artists do not speak in unisono about the value of heritage, and what role it might play in artistic work. The one thing they probably agree on is that ‘heated discussions are necessary’. Researching the diversity of opinion, Woets shows that many artists are, somewhat paradoxically, inspired by cultural forms that many intellectuals view as part of an authentic Ghanaian heritage, while also investing their work with global meaning and messages for humankind. Other artists emphasize the need to move beyond conceptions of an immutable African essence in their urge to connect to global, cosmopolitan artistic discourses. Woets finds that the display of cultural pride through heritage design is not sufficiently addressed by the oftenheard argument that references to cultural heritage are merely a strategy to distinguish oneself in a competitive art market. Moreover, the conventional dichotomy between African artists who deliberately evoke a distinct African identity in their work, and those who eschew the portrayal of some kind of prefabricated ‘African heritage’, is more complex than often suggested. Heritage repertoires are not static but encompass a resource from which artists creatively produce new art styles in the encounter with new (foreign) markets.

Introduction 29

Markus Balkenhol examines two recent examples of heritage formation by Dutch Afro-Surinamese. At a time when concerns about the colour of ‘Dutchness’ have provoked public debate, a grassroots initiative of Afro-Surinamese in Amsterdam successfully petitioned for a statue of Anton de Kom (1898–1945), an Afro-Surinamese intellectual and activist. Unveiled in 2007, the statue became highly contested because many people felt offended by the design: a naked torso emerging from a tree. Protestors argued that this portrayal reified colonial fantasies of wildness, sexuality and blackness instead of providing an image of De Kom ‘as he really was’. Balkenhol contrasts the controversy surrounding the statue with the unproblematic acceptance of the Kabra (ancestor) Mask created by Marian Markelo, a priestess in the Afro-Surinamese Winti religion in the Netherlands, and Boris van Berkum, a Dutch artist. Alarmed by severe budget cuts in the Dutch cultural and museum sector, they undertook a project to ‘safeguard’ African heritage in the Netherlands and to reappropriate masks to honour the African ancestors. Using 3D technology, six wooden Yoruba masks were scanned in the Africa Museum, computer rendered, and milled into polyurethane foam. The new 3D masks situate the project in a politics of authentication that promises to grant material and palpable access to the past and the spirit world through material form. Discussing the ways in which these heritage formations were – and were not – persuasive, Balkenhol highlights the role of ancestors. Again, this chapter shows that the production of heritage is deeply entangled with religious concerns. In her chapter, ‘Ascertaining the Future Memory of Our Time: Dutch Institutions Collecting Relics of National Tragedy’, Irene Stengs investigates one specific way in which people seek to construct the future memory of our present time: by preserving objects pertaining to extraordinarily emotional events. The material is based on three case studies, all related to twenty-first century Dutch society. The objects concerned are: the pistol that killed politician Pim Fortuyn (May 2002); the knife that the assassin left in the chest of filmmaker Theo van Gogh (November 2004); and the car that was used in the attack on the Queen and the royal family during the 2009 Queen’s Day celebrations, which killed seven members of the audience. Stengs analyses the fierce debates surrounding the preservation and possible exhibition of these objects in Dutch museums. The Rijksmuseum, for instance, considered the pistol that killed Fortuyn comparable to the ‘relics from Dutch national history’ (vaderlandse relieken), whose preservation and exhibition are among the museum’s core tasks. Taking this argument as her point of departure, Stengs first discusses the aforementioned objects as sensational forms that inform the creation of contemporary secular relics. Second, she addresses the interplay between the memories of eyewitnesses; the authentication of future history; and the contestations over the question as to who has the authority to single out objects as ­‘anticipatory heritage’.

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The volume is concluded with a set of comments by David Chidester, David Berliner and Ciraj Raasool. Based on a detailed reading of the chapters, they spotlight common themes, questions and challenges for future work on heritage-making in our time. Mattijs van de Port is Professor of Popular Religiosity at VU University Amsterdam and Associate Professor at the anthropology department of the University of Amsterdam. Publications include the monographs Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild: Civilization and its Discontents in a Serbian Town (Amsterdam University Press, 1998) and Ecstatic Encounters: Bahian Candomblé and the Quest for the Really Real (Amsterdam University Press, 2011). Birgit Meyer is Professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University. She is co-editor of Material Religion and the Berghahn series Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement. 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).

Notes This introduction seeks to spell out some core ideas that underpin our approach to processes of heritage formation. Special thanks for constructive criticism and stimulating suggestions to Anandita Bajpai, Ferdinand De Jong and one anonymous reviewer.   1. As noted in the Preface, our research was made possible by the NWO multidisciplinary research programme on Cultural Dynamics, which highlighted ‘heritage’ as a significant example. The programme declared the study of cultural heritage to be ‘key’ in providing an answer to the ‘sudden feeling of crisis’, whereby ‘Western societies have lost their self-assurance’ (Frijhof 2013: 5). The programme further stated that ‘The homogeneity of national societies is breaking down, the importance ascribed by societal partners and other players to cultural differences and diversity is being given greater weight, and globalization seems to be generating unexpected effects on societal integration and social cohesion’ (Frijhof 2013: 5). The programme further asserted that ‘Western societies are wrestling with their identities, with their place in the world, and with their contribution to overall happiness’ (Frijhof 2013: 5). By focusing on the dynamics of heritage formation in several national settings, we sought to contribute to debates on identity and the politics of difference by broadening the scope towards various multi-ethnic and multireligious societies outside of Europe.   2. As pointed out by Brumann and Berliner, this kind of analysis has also been pursued in the context of ‘critical heritage studies’, which tend to ‘reinvent the deconstructive arguments made earlier about “tradition” … or “culture”’ (2016: 7).

Introduction 31

  3. We are aware that this approach may be reminiscent of current debates regarding ‘ontology’, but we leave an exploration of the way our arguments articulate with that literature for another occasion.  4. This attention would certainly include Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of ‘strategic essentialism’, coined in the 1980s to denote a political strategy whereby minority groups essentialize themselves in order to claim certain rights.   5. For example, see Bendix, Eggert and Peselmann (2013); Berliner (2012); Blumenfield and Silverman (2013); De Jong and Rowlands (2007); Lowenthal (1998); Schramm (2004).  6. http://whc.unesco.org/en/culturallandscape/.   7. See the website of the International Committee for the Conservation of Industrial Heritage, http://ticcih.org. For a discussion, see Frisch (1998) and Petrovic (2013).  8. http://list.english-heritage.org.uk/results.aspx  9. http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/news/Eighteen-new-elements-inscribed-on-the-​ Representative-List-00108. 10. http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=enandpg=00559. 11. Most scholars customarily start their genealogy of the heritage concept somewhere in the (long) nineteenth century, using such marker points as the French Revolution, the 1882 Ancient Monument Act in Britain or the establishment of the National Trust in 1895. 12. For a very helpful overview of the ‘rise and setup of UNESCO world heritage’ see Brumann and Berliner (2016: 8–13). For a long-term perspective on heritage formation as ‘civilizing mission’ from colonial settings to the rise of UNESCO see Falser (2015). 13. See the special issue ‘Heritage and The Sacred’, Material Religion (9[3], 2013) coedited by Marleen de Witte and Birgit Meyer. Moreover, processes of secularization and unchurching, yielding a decline in church membership and the closure of church buildings, entail a process of conversion of lived Christianity into forms of cultural heritage that embody the Christian past. See the HERA-Project, Iconic Religion, in the context of which Daan Beekers and Birgit Meyer conduct research on the reproduction of Christianity as heritage in the Netherlands: http://iconicreligion.com/ portfolio/amsterdam/. This project also produced the online exhibition The Urban Sacred: http://www.urban-sacred.org. 14. The decision was made on 15 January 2015. For an analysis of the debates, see Balkenhol (2015), Helsloot (2012), Van der Pijl and Goulordava (2014). 15. See Abu El-Haj (2001). In a similar vein, Biblical archaeology is criticized for striving to authenticate claims towards a Jewish and early Christian past in Palestine, and Jerusalem as the Holy City of Judaism and Islam by producing evidence through the matching of written and material sources. For the construction of the Holy Land as a longstanding imperial and ecclesiastical project see Norderval (forthcoming). 16. The remark stands in sharp contrast with reports that IS has obtained significant revenues by selling these items. On the flipside of the public vandalization of world heritage stands the sale of antiquities in the global market. Both the destruction and sale of items associated with pre-Islamic cultures ultimately affirm the value attributed to them. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/26/isis-fighters-destroyancient-artefacts-mosul-museum-iraq 17. The concerns of these officials may also have been imbued with affect – driven by their love for history and the Dutch landscape. We should take care not to assume facile oppositions between ‘passionate villagers’ and ‘cold bureaucrats’. For a discussion, see Berliner (2012). 18. For a full discussion of different understandings of authenticity (as ‘original’, ‘facsimile’, ‘verisimilitude’, ‘authentic reconstruction’) on a heritage site in the United States, see Bruner (1994).

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19. German original: ‘… ein Container, der in der Moderne dazu benutzt wurde, um auszuhandeln, was jeweils echt und falsch, gut und böse, schön und hässlich galt’. In their evocative essay, historians Andrea Rehling and Johannes Paulmann trace the use of the notion of authenticity and the striving for the genuine in history, archaeology, philosophy and heritage politics. As part of the Leibniz Forschunsgverbund Historische Authentizität they call for a historical study of the politics of use of authenticity and the role played by scholars in the contemporary production of the past as heritage. 20. Although the movement was clearly indebted to eighteenth-century Sentimentalism, this current was also criticized for ‘promoting public displays of emotions that were conducive to insincerity’ (Wilf 2011: 470). 21. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-sA4Rau2tY&list=ELrBPjEuWsGsc&index=5 22. But, as Rancière (2006) reminds us, such pre-reflexive understandings are eminently political (see also below). 23. Baumgarten’s (1750) work is not available in English translation but may be accessed online in Latin through Cambridge Books. An English translation of Kant’s (1790) work is available online through the Internet Archive: both are included in the References. In aesthetic theory as it developed in philosophy since Baumgarten and Kant, art and aesthetics were understood as constitutive of the sensus communis aestheticus or aesthetischer Gemeinsinn in the German original (Kant 1790), which served as a new paradigm for the formation of community in post-enlightenment bourgeois society (Eagleton 1990: 13). In his famous treatise Über die Ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795), which may well be regarded as the foundational manifesto for modern subjectivity, Friedrich Schiller presented aesthetics as a crucial domain for the cultivation of ethical sensibilities: for him, in mediating between sensuousness (Sinnlichkeit) and reason (Vernunft), matter and spirit, body and mind, aesthetics was indispensable to the making of modern personhood and society (see also Rancière 2006, 2009). However, the importance attributed to aesthetics in the genesis of community and a didactic of self-cultivation by these and other eighteenthcentury thinkers was barely pursued in the course of the nineteenth century, with its strong, enthusiastic investment in Romanticism, on the one hand, and pursuit of Enlightenment Rationalism, on the other; sensuousness and reason, body and mind, tended to drift ever farther apart. When sociology emerged as a modern discipline in the early twentieth century, it leaned strongly towards the latter rationalizing strand (Reckwitz 2015: 16–21). 24. Of course, there were thinkers who followed alternative paths, like Nietzsche and Simmel (see Reckwitz 2008: 260). 25. Original: ‘Das Ästhetische als die Sphäre intensivierter sinnlicher Wahrnehmung und der Affekte, der kreativen Gestaltung des handlungsentlasteten Erlebens und des Sinnbruchs kognitiv-normativer Systeme erscheint innerhalb dieses klassischen soziologischen “grand-récit” der Tendenz nach als das Andere der Moderne, keinesfalls jedoch als ihr gesellschaftliches Zentrum’. 26. Original: ‘Praktiken organisieren nicht nur Handeln, sie organisieren auch Erleben, Affekte und sinnliche Wahrnehmung auf ihre jeweils kulturell spezifische Weise: durch eine Sensibilisierung bestimmter Sinne auf Kosten anderer, durch eine routinemäßige Hervorrufung bestimmter, mental-leiblicher Erlebniszustände, durch die Hervorlockung bestimmter Empfindungen oder eben auch nahezu “affective-neutrale” Zustände. Entscheidend ist soziologisch, hier nicht phänomenologisch “innere” Zustände zu sehen, Wahrnehmung, Erleben oder Affekt nicht “psychisch” zuzurechnen, sondern sie als Bestandteil kultureller Praktiken zu modellieren’ (2008: 278). 27. Our own inroad into the study of the senses does not derive from, but certainly resonates with, anthropological approaches to aesthetics grounded in the study of art (e.g. Coote and Shelton 1992; Gell 1998; Svašek 2007).

Introduction 33

28. See Sirupa Roy (2007) on pervasion and techniques of producing nationalism in India. With thanks to Anandita Bajpai for drawing our attention to this work, and to the concept of pervasion. 29. Both rhetoric and science depend on oratory. Interestingly, even though Aristotle regarded rhetoric and science as different, he conceded that every system of instruction needs style to some extent. However, whereas science operates in a strictly intellectual register that, at least ideally, can do without rhetoric because scientific facts speak for themselves, rhetoric is about the art of convincing and influencing opinion via means other than sheer facts alone: it needs specific means of persuasion. Over the past century, the idea of a pure science that can do without persuasion because its facts speak for themselves has become subject to increasing critique and doubt. 30. Aristotle: ‘Appropriate style also makes the fact appear credible. For the mind of the hearer is imposed upon under the impression that the speaker is speaking the truth, because, in such circumstances his feelings are the same, so that he thinks (even if it is not the case as the speaker puts it) that things are as he represents them; and the hearer always sympathizes with one who speaks emotionally, even though he really says nothing. This is why speakers often confound their hearers by mere noise’ (1926: 397).

References Abu El-Haj, N. 2001. Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and Territorial Self-fashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, pp. 259–61. Adams, K.A. 2005. ‘Public Interest Anthropology in Heritage Sites: Writing Culture and Righting Wrongs’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 11(5): 433–39. Aristotle 1926 (circa 330bc). The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric (trans. J.H. Freese). London: William Heinemann and New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons. Arthurs, J. 2010. ‘Fascism as Heritage in Contemporary Italy’, in A. Mammone and G. Veltri (eds), Italy Today: The Sick Man of Europe. London: Routledge, pp. 114–27. Ashworth, G. and J. Tunbridge. 1996. Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict. Chichester: Wiley. Balkenhol, M.2015. ‘Zwarte Piet, Racisme, Emoties’,Waardenwerk (62/63): 36–46. Baumann, G. 1999. The Multicultural Riddle: Rethinking National, Ethnic, and Religious Identities. New York and London: Routledge. Baumgarten, G. 1750. Aesthetica. Retrieved 19 November 2017 from the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_dopKAAAAcAAJ Bendix, R. 1997. In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Bendix, R., A. Eggert and A. Peselmann (eds). 2013. Heritage Regimes and the State. Göttingen Studies in Cultural Property Vol 6. Göttingen: Universitätsverlag. Berliner, D. 2012. ‘Multiple Nostalgias: The Fabric of Heritage in Luang Prabang’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18(4): 769–86.

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Blumenfield, T. and H. Silverman (eds). 2013. Cultural Heritage Politics in China. New York: Springer. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Brosius, C. and K.M. Polit (eds). 2015. Ritual, Heritage and Identity: The Politics of Culture and Performance in a Globalized World. Abingdon and New Delhi: Routledge. Brubaker, R. and F. Cooper. 2000. ‘Beyond “Identity”’, Theory and Society 29: 1–47. Brumann, C. and D. Berliner. 2016. ‘Introduction: UNESCO World Heritage  – Grounded?’ in C. Brumann and D. Berliner (eds), World Heritage on the Ground: Ethnographic Perspectives. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 1–34. Bruner, E.M. 1994. ‘Abraham Lincoln as Authentic Reproduction: A Critique of Postmodernism’, American Ethnologist 96(2): 397–415. Byrne, D. 1991. ‘Western Hegemony in Archaeological Heritage Management’, History and Anthropology 5(2): 269–76. Chidester, D. 2005. Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Clifford, J. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Comaroff, J.L. and J. Comaroff. 2009. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Coote, J. and A. Shelton. 1992. ‘Introduction’, in J. Coote and A. Shelton (eds), Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 1–11. Daehnke, J.D. 2007. ‘A “Strange Multiplicity” of Voices: Heritage Stewardship, Contested Sites and Colonial Legacies on the Columbia River’, Journal of Social Archaeology 7(2): 250–75. De Jong, F. 2007. ‘A Masterpiece of Masquerading: Contradictions of Conservation in Intangible Heritage’, in F. De Jong and M. Rowlands (eds), Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, pp. 161–84. De Jong, F. and M. Rowlands (eds). 2007. Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. De Witte, M. 2004. ‘Afrikania’s Dilemma: Reframing African Authenticity in a Christian Public Sphere’, Etnofoor 17(1/2): 133–55. Eagleton, T. 1989. ‘The Ideology of the Aesthetic’, in H. Paul (ed.), The Rhetoric of Interpretation and the Interpretation of Rhetoric. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 75–87. Eagleton, T. 1990. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Eagleton, T. 2009. Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics. London: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Fairchild Ruggles, D. 2011. ‘The Stratigraphy of Forgetting: The Great Mosque of Cordoba and its Contested Legacy’, in H. Silverman (ed.), Contested Cultural Heritage: Religion, Nationalism, Erasure and Exclusion in a Globalizing World. London: Springer, pp. 51–67. Falser, M. (ed.). 2015. Cultural Heritage as Civilizing Mission: From Decay to Recovery. Cham, Heidelberg, New York, Dordrecht and London: Springer. Falser, M. 2016. ‘Theory-Scapes Transkulturell: Zur Karriere des Begriffs der Authentizität in der globalen Denkmalpflege’, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Kunst und Denkmalpflege LXIX(1/2): 33–40. Fillitz, T. and A. Jamie Saris (eds). 2013. Debating Authenticity: Concepts of Modernity in Anthropological Perspective. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Frijhof, W. et al. 2013. Culturele Dynamiek: Onderzoeksprogramma ­2007–2014. Programmanotitie, NWO, March. Frisch, M. 1998. ‘De-, Re-, and Post-Industrialization: Industrial Heritage as Contested Memorial Terrain’, Journal of Folklore Research (1998): 241–49. Fuchs, S. 2001. Against Essentialism: A Theory of Culture and Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Funk, W., F. Groß and I. Huber (eds). 2012. The Aesthetics of Authenticity: Medial Constructions of the Real. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Fuss, D. 1989. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference. London: Routledge. Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic. Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Geschiere, P. 2009. The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and  Exclusion in Africa and Europe. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Guignon, C. 2006. On Being Authentic. London: Routledge. Grillo, R.D. 2003. ‘Cultural Essentialism and Cultural Anxiety’, Anthropological Theory 3(2): 157–73. Hackenberg, R.A. 2002. ‘Closing the Gap between Anthropology and Public Policy: The Route through Cultural Heritage Development’, Human Organization 61(3): 288–98. Handler, R. 2001. ‘Anthropology and Authenticity’, in N. Smelser and P. Baltes (eds), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences. Oxford: Pergamon, pp. 963–67. Hartnett, A. 2011. ‘Aestheticized Geographies of Conflict: The Politicization of Culture and the Culture of Politics in Belfast’s Mural Tradition’, in H. Silverman (ed.), Contested Cultural Heritage: Religion, Nationalism, Erasure and Exclusion in a Globalizing World. London: Springer: 69–107.

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Harvey, D.C. 2001. ‘Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents: Temporality, Meaning and the Scope of Heritage Studies’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 7(4): 319–38. Helsloot, J.I.A. 2012. ‘Zwarte Piet and Cultural Aphasia in the Netherlands’, Quotidian: Journal for the Study of Everyday Life 3: 1–20. Henderson, J.C. 2001. ‘Conserving Colonial Heritage: Raffles Hotel in Singapore’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 7(1): 7–24. Herzfeld, M. 1996. ‘Essentialism’, in A. Barnard and J. Spencer (eds), The Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology. London: Routledge: 188–90. Hirschkind, C. 2016. ‘Granadan Reflections’, Material Religion 12(2): 209–32. Hodder, I. 2012. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Hurenkamp, M., E. Tonkens and J.W. Duyvendak. 2011. ‘Citizenship in the Netherlands: Locally Produced, Nationally Contested’, Citizenship Studies 15(2): 205–25. Kant, I. 1914 [1790]. Critique of Judgement. Toronto: Macmillan. Retrieved 19 November 2017 from https://archive.org/stream/critiqueofjudgem 00kantuoft#page/n17/mode/2up Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. 1998. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ———. 2004. SIEF Keynote Conference Presentation. Marseilles, April 28. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Light, D. 2000. ‘Gazing on Communism: Heritage Tourism and PostCommunist Identities in Germany, Hungary and Romania’, Tourism Geographies 2(2): 157–76. Lizon, P. 1996. ‘East Central Europe: The Unhappy Heritage of Communist Mass Housing’, Journal of Architectural Education 50(2): 104–14. Lovrenovic, M. 2002. ‘Bosnia and Herzegovina: Boundaries and Permeation’,  in: S. Resic and B. Törnquist-Plewa (eds), The Balkans in Focus: Cultural Boundaries in Europe. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, pp. 113–19. Lowenthal, D. 2005. ‘Natural and Cultural Heritage’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 11(1): 81–92. Macdonald, S. 2010. Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond. London: Routledge. Marx, K. 1999 [1852]. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. Retrieved 19 November 2017 from Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marx ists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm Mazzarella, W. 2004. ‘Culture, Globalization, Mediation’, Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 345–67.

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Meyer, B. 2004. ‘“Praise the Lord …” Popular Cinema and Pentecostalite Style in Ghana’s New Public Sphere’, American Ethnologist 31(1): 92–110. ———. 2006. ‘Religious Sensations: Why Media, Aesthetics and Power Matter in the Study of Contemporary Religion’, Inaugural Lecture, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. 6 October. ———. 2009. ‘Introduction – From Imagined Communities to Aesthetic Formations: Religious Mediations, Sensational Forms and Styles of Binding’, in B. Meyer (ed.), Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion and the Senses in the Making of Communities. London: Palgrave, pp. 1–28. ———. 2014. ‘Mediation and the Genesis of Presence’ (reprint of inaugural lecture), with a response on comments by Hans Belting, Pamela Klassen, Chris Pinney, Monique Scheer, Religion and Society: Advances in Research 5: 205–54. ———. 2015a. ‘Picturing the Invisible: Visual Culture and the Study of Religion’, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 27: 333–60. ———. 2015b. Sensational Movies: Video, Vision and Christianity in Ghana. Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press. ———. 2016. ‘How to Capture the Wow: R.R. Marett’s Notion of Awe and the Study of Religion’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22: 7–26. Meyer, B., H. Roodenburg and M. van de Port. 2008. ‘Heritage Dynamics: Politics of Authentication and Aesthetics of Persuasion in Brazil, Ghana, the Netherlands and South Africa’. Research Proposal. Meyer, B. and J. Verrips. 2008, ‘Aesthetics’, in D. Morgan (ed.), Key Words in Religion, Media, Culture. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 20–30. Meyer, C. and F. Girke. 2011. The Rhetorical Emergence of Culture. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Miller, W.I. 2005. Faking It … Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Norderval, Ø. Forthcoming. ‘Construction of the Holy Land: The Christian Palestine as an Imperial and Ecclesiastical Project’, in T. Stordaen (ed.), Levantine Entanglements. Peterson, D., K. Gavua and C. Rassool (eds). 2015. The Politics of Heritage in Africa: Economies, Histories and Infrastructures. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Peterson, D. 2015. ‘Introduction: Heritage Management in Colonial and Contemporary Africa’, in D. Peterson, K. Gavua and C. Rassool (eds), The Politics of Heritage in Africa: Economies, Histories and Infrastructures. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–36. Petrovic, T. 2013. ‘Museums and Workers: Negotiating Industrial Heritage in the Former Yugoslavia’, Nardona Umjetnost 50(1): 96–120. Probst, P. 2007. ‘Picturing the Past: Heritage, Photography, and the Politics of Appearance in a Yoruba City’, in F. De Jong and M. Rowlands (eds),

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Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, pp. 99–125. ———. 2011. Osogbo and the Art of Heritage. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rancière, J. 2006. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London: Continuum. ———. 2009. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Continuum. Rassool, C. 2001. ‘Cultural History in Collections: Exploring Museum Collections’, South African Museums Association Bulletin 26(2): 43–49. ———. 2015. ‘Human Remains: The Disciplines of the Dead and the South African Memorial Complex’, in D. Peterson, K. Gavua and C. Rassool (eds), The Politics of Heritage in Africa: Economies, Histories and Infrastructures. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 133–56. Reckwitz, A. 2008. Unscharfe Grenzen: Perspektiven der Kultursoziologie. Bielefeld: Transcript. Reckwitz, A. 2015. ‘Ästhetik und Gesellschaft – Ein analytischer Bezugsrahmen’, in A. Reckwitz, S. Prinz and H. Schäfer (eds), Ästhetik und Gesellschaft: Grundlagentexte aus Soziologie und Kulturwiss­ enschaften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 13–52. Rehling, A. and J. Paulmann. 2016. ‘Historische Authentizität jenseits von “Original” und “Fälschung”’, in M. Sabrow and A. Saupe (eds), Historische Authentizität. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, pp. 91–125. Rorty, A.O. 2006. ‘The Vanishing Subject: The Many Faces of Subjectivity’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 23(3): 191–209. Roy, S. 2007. Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Schramm, K. 2004. ‘Senses of Authenticity: Chieftaincy and the Politics of Heritage’, Etnofoor17 (1/2): 156–77. Stordalen, T. and S-A. Naguib (eds). 2015. The Formative Past and the Formation of the Future: Collective Remembering and Identity Formation. Oslo: Novus. Svašek, M. 2007. Anthropology, Art and Cultural Production. London: Pluto. ———. 2016. ‘Undoing Absence through Things: Creative Appropriation and Affective Engagement in an Indian Transnational Setting’, in M. Svašek and B. Meyer (eds), Creativity in Transition. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Taussig, M. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. London: Routledge. Taylor, C. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turnbridge, J.E. 1984. ‘Whose Heritage to Conserve? Cross-cultural Reflections on Political Dominance and Urban Heritage Conservation’, The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien 28(2): 171–80.

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Van de Port, M. 2004. ‘Registers of Incontestability: The Quest for Authenticity in Academia and Beyond’, Etnofoor 17(1/2): 1–24. ———. 2009. ‘“Don’t Ask Questions, Just Observe!” Boundary Politics in Bahian Candomblé’, in B. Meyer (ed.), Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion and the Senses. New York: Palgrave. ———. 2011. Ecstatic Encounters: Bahian Candomblé and the Quest for the Really Real. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ———. 2012. ‘Genuinely Made Up: Camp, Baroque and the Production of the Really Real’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18: 864–83. Van der Pijl, Y. and K. Goulordava. 2014. ‘Black Pete, “Smug Ignorance” and the Value of the Black Body in Postcolonial Netherlands’, New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 88(3–4): 262–91. Verrips, J. 2006. ‘Aisthesis  and An-aesthesia’, Ethnologia Europea 35: 27–33. Wilf, E. 2011. ‘Sincerity Versus Self Expression: Modern Creative Agency and the Materiality of Semiotic Forms’, Cultural Anthropology 26(4): 462–84.

1 Aesthetics as Form and Force

•

Notes on the Shaping of Pataxó Indian Bodies

André Werneck de Andrade Bakker

Not only gardens but gods too are to be won over by beauty – and all this ­aesthetic lore and artisanry beautifying the work of man can be seen more generally as what goes into designing the world … We may call this culture, and  the point then seems obvious that cultures have an aesthetic or several thereof  perhaps in stark conflict. More to the point is the dependence on the aesthetic. —Michael Taussig, Beauty and the Beast To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. —Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

Introduction ‘Indians do not have beards, or moustaches, or body hair’.1 The Brazilian Xavante Indian and former congressman Mario Juruna was unequivocal in his verdict. Appointed in 1984 as the head of a national congressional delegation sent to investigate a violent land dispute between Bahian farmers and the Pataxó Hã-hã-hãe Indians2 in the Bahian hinterlands, Juruna thus justified his pronouncement to the Folha da Tarde newspaper upon his return to Brasília: amidst the Pataxó he discerned ‘a majority of caboclos and only half-a-dozen Indians’. 3 As caboclos – those

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‘Indians-who-are-no-more’, seen as having entered upon the irreversible, withering road to acculturation – the Pataxó Hã-hã-hãe’s moustaches, beards and chest hair stood as the bald testimony of their indigenous fallacy.4 Facial and body hair are far from exhausting the range of ‘semiotic forms’ by which authentic Indianness may be assessed. 5 Take that wonderful story brought forward by Beth Conklin (1997) in her discussion of aesthetics and authenticity in the context of Amazonian eco-activism. During the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro, on account of being excluded from the summit’s official events, indigenous peoples under the International Indigenous Commission (IIC) organized an alternative forum wherein indigenous peoples alone were to be admitted. Confronted with the dilemma of how to distinguish between indigenous and non-indigenous people, several Kayapo addressed the problem by stationing themselves as self-appointed bouncers at the doors of the conference room to determine who would be admitted.6 Faced with would-be participants as diverse as Filipino tribals and blond, blue-eyed Laplanders, they screened on the basis of appearance: only individuals wearing exotic, apparently non-Western costumes were admitted. Thus, when two North American Indians appeared dressed in street clothes, they were turned away. When the same two individuals returned the following day in beads and feathers, they entered without difficulty. (Conklin 1997: 727)

In a footnote, the author adds that ‘complaints from many not-obviously indigenous indigenous people led to a decision to distribute T-shirts to all “certified” representatives of indigenous organizations and restrict access to the IIC meeting to individuals wearing these T-shirts’ (Conklin 1997: 733, Note 29, my emphasis). I cannot but wonder whether the Pataxó would have been given access to the forum – or whether they would all too suitably fit Conklin’s image of ‘not-obviously indigenous indigenous peoples’ vainly knocking on the doors of authenticity. Glossed by the author as ‘a highly acculturated northeastern Brazilian group that also lacked elaborate featherwork and, to many outsiders’ eyes, did not “look” like Indians’ (Conklin 1997: 727), the Pataxó, along with a range of other indigenous peoples from the Brazilian north-east, were for most of the twentieth century taken to be ‘indigenous remainders’: acculturated ‘descendants’ of the region’s native peoples, forcibly brought into missionary settlements during the colonial period and progressively ‘integrated’ into the national society (Arruti 2000).7 Influenced by the acculturation studies paradigm, an earlier generation of ethnologists referred to their contemporaries as ‘mestiçados’ (Galvão 1979: 225–26), woeful instantiations of the inexorable march of modernity and its attendant forces of cultural corruption (Ribeiro 1970: 149).8 Unlike the Kayapó, with their vibrant featherwork, body paint and eye-catching adornments indexing notions of cultural integrity, the Pataxó

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body, all too hairy and short of resplendent alterity, seemingly bore witness to that alleged cultural loss. And yet, as we leap from these public renderings of the Pataxó throughout the 1980s and 90s to the way they appear in current mass media, radically different images burst through. Allow me to dwell on two examples. During the Rio+20 Summit of 2012 (the follow-up to the 1992 Summit), on the occasion of a protest against the building of the Belo Monte hydroelectric power plant, a photograph made the front page of O Globo newspaper and triggered a worldwide media effervescence: the Pataxó Indian, Wynatã, was caught on camera in the gardens of the Brazilian National Development Bank (BNDES) with his bow arched, aiming at aghast security guards seeking shelter from his arrows.9 Juxtaposing the hyper-urban backdrop of Rio de Janeiro’s city centre, home to the BNDES building, with that fiery incarnation of the ‘savage’ Indian warrior clad in feathers and anatto dye,10 the image reverberated into a two-page reportage in the weekly Globo magazine two weeks after the event, bearing the title ‘The BNDES Indian’. Journalist Pedro Sprejer marvelled at the boldness of Wynatã’s feat, the ‘dialect’ with which he talked to his Pataxó companions, and the ‘tribal sounds of warning’ he would have emitted to the guards upon their encounter. But Sprejer was quick to add that beneath his awe-inspiring appearance, Wynatã resembled the former football player Romário. Wynatã was said to be a rapacious peddler of his handicraft throughout the Summit, speaking a Bahian-loaded Portuguese with his ‘customers’ and ignoring an offer of two hundred reais for his porcupine leather bag. His headdress, Sprejer highlights, was made of chicken, rather than more noble feathers from the wild.11 No less flamboyant than Wynatã, Ubiraí, another Pataxó, also attracted much media attention. When the recently appointed Pope Francis visited Brazil, Ubiraí gave him a self-made cocar (feathered headdress), which the Pope immediately put on. In a column of Globo’s website (tellingly titled ‘Life as it Appears to Be’) authored by anthropologist Yvonne Maggie, Ubiraí is reported to have said that no contradiction dwells in the juxtaposition of Indian and Catholic identities and that the cocar, being of utmost importance to Pataxó culture, ‘is an amulet for protection connecting spirit with land: and there is no one more suited to receive a cocar than the Pope’. (What merrier semiotic marriage could ever exist between ‘culture’ and ‘religion’ than this joyful, immediate wearing of a cocar by so holy a head!) Evoking Caminha’s lyrical description of the docility of the Amerindian character and the exuberance of their bodies during the event of the ‘­discovery’,12 Maggie notes the similarities between Ubiraí’s adornments and those depicted in the ‘First Contact’. Ubiraí looks much like those first-contact Amerindians, she suggests. Yet he is a Catholic. He speaks Portuguese with a heavy Bahian accent. And, secretly winking at us, Maggie reveals that Ubiraí was hosted in Rio de Janeiro at an AfroBrazilian ‘Umbanda’ temple, his name being derivative of Ubirajara, a

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spiritual entity revered in that tradition. He may not even know that, she ponders (in the tradition of anthropological pondering about native awareness); and suggests that rather than representing pristine Amerindians, Ubiraí actually stands for ‘traditional Brazil, the Brazil of encounter and mixture’, and the ‘historical tradition of the relationship between the Catholic church and subjugated groups’.13 What do these events tell us? Contrasting with Juruna’s pointed conviction over the Pataxó’s ‘cabocloness’ in the 1980s, here it is the sheen of their appearance that rivets the eye: the depictions foreground the elaborateness of their bodies, the ‘dialect’ in which they speak, their being ‘tribal’. Nonetheless, both Sprejer and Maggie seem to feel the urge to strip Wynatã’s and Ubiraí’s vibrant looks, hinting at their Bahian accent, their being driven by an all too mundane thirst for profit or involvement with ‘syncretistic’ Afro-Brazilian religious traditions. ‘Underneath their appearances’, they seem to be telling their readership, ‘they are not quite what they appear to be’. Could it be that this drive to ‘unveil’ – this diligence with which the types of their feathers, the sounds of their voices and the semantics of their names are perused as to their ‘factual’ origins – stems from the very force of appearances, from the persuasive force of the aesthetic in the politics of indigenous authenticity? Is not this exposition of ‘being able to see through appearances’ testimony to the symbolic poignancy and persuasiveness of body paint and featherwork, native languages and names in eliciting a sense of the ‘really real’ Indian? ‘Everything hinges on appearance’, wrote Taussig (1993: 133) about the  dialectical interface of mimesis and alterity in Cuna metaphysical  matters. In a Western epistemic hierarchy, appearance takes on the aspect of a misleading facade, and is put in opposition to the hidden real of essence (Taussig 1993: 129–36). Not so with the Cuna. The wooden figurines deployed by Cuna shamans – depicting human figures wearing ties and western suits – bespeak the power sought via the appropriation of the form of powerful Others. ‘What is essential to grasp here’, Taussig writes, ‘is the strangely naïve and ultimately perplexing point that appearance is power and that this is a function of the fact that appearance itself can acquire density and substance. It is this property that brings spirit, soul and image into the one constellation’ (Taussig 1993: 176, my emphasis). Taking Taussig’s (1993: 177) point that ‘colonial history too must be understood as spiritual politics in which image-power is an exceedingly valuable resource’, this chapter ponders the vital ‘dependence on the aesthetic’ in heritage politics and the centrality of the body as a medium for rendering ‘culture’ present. Following the trajectories through which the Pataxó Indians have radically altered their image from ‘acculturated caboclos’ to front-page Indians of note, I wish to highlight two central dimensions of this transformative process: the Pataxó’s entanglement with an ever more important politics of national heritage commemoration and

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the ensuing dynamic formation of a Pataxó ethnic identity; and their reliance, like Cuna shamans, on a mimetic drive towards Others as sources of image-power. Throughout the 1990s, the Pataxó became central protagonists in the public celebration of the 500th anniversary of the ‘discovery of Brazil’. Being the indigenous people currently dwelling along the coastal area of southern Bahia where the Portuguese expeditions first set foot, the Pataxó progressively became cast as the ‘discovery Indians’ (Grünewald 2001). Over time, they have deliberately devised practices of bodily adornment that were not inherited from their forebears. Undoubtedly, the Pataxó have created such practices over the past two decades, and found themselves inspired by a mimetic drive towards other Indians – in particular, Amazonian and Central-Brazilian indigenous peoples. As they creatively engage in this redesign of their bodies while setting out to ground such aesthetic novelties as Pataxó culture, the Pataxó touch upon the central paradox of heritage politics addressed in this book – the widespread appeal of heritage forms as standing for substantial, time-honoured expressions of the cultural uniqueness of collectives, notwithstanding their being constantly in the making. This transformative drive among Amerindian peoples has received ample attention in the anthropological literature, and two contrastive approaches can be distinguished in the ethnological field. One is chiefly concerned with processes of ‘ethnogenesis’ in the Brazilian north-east.14 Inspired by Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira’s (1964) model of ‘interethnic friction’ developed in the 1960s, which moved away from the culturalist tradition of ‘acculturation’ to the scope of relations between indigenous and non-indigenous collectives, and by Barth’s (1969) approach to ethnic boundary-making as political process, this tradition has addressed the shifting relationships of indigenous collectives with the Brazilian nation state – which, during the second half of the twentieth century, and particularly since the introduction of the Constitution of 1988, has been marked by new legal frameworks concerning indigenous rights (see also Adinolfi, this volume). Putting history and the analytical trope of ‘territoriality’ centre stage, authors from this school have focused on the interface between the state’s institutional apparatus for the identification and tutorship of indigenous peoples and the diacritical differentiation of these collectives vis-à-vis other indigenous collectives and non-Indians at large.15 On the other hand, another tradition, predominantly concerned with Amazonian indigenous peoples and often referred to as ‘classic ethnology’ (Viveiros de Castro 1999: 111), underlines a consistent inconsistency in these collectives: how the relation with alterity (in the form of either human or non-human collectives) overrides Amerindian socialities (Viveiros de Castro 2002: 195–96, 209). Following the analytical agenda set by LéviStrauss’s influential Mythologiques tetralogy and his characterization of

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Amerindian thought as marked by an ‘openness to the Other’, scholars approaching topics as diverse as warfare (Fausto 2000, Viveiros de Castro 2002), styles of dress (Santos-Granero 2009), shamanism and the body (Viveiros de Castro 1998; Vilaça 2005), kinship (Gow 1991; Vilaça 2002), conversion to Christianity (Vilaça and Wright 2009) or broader relations with ‘Whites’ (Kelly 2011) have pointed out how Amerindian ontologies and modes of social reproduction rely on an immanent relationship with Others and the outer spheres of the socius – as Fausto describes it, alterity as a necessary source of fertility and creative potential (Fausto 2000: 934). Hence an ‘Indian-becoming’ (devir-índio) is key to an Amerindian ‘tradition of invention’ (Viveiros de Castro 1999: 193) – a ‘tradition’ that, in stark contrast with its Western homonym predicated on discrete, stabilized identities and their respective cultural heritage styles, is marked by a perennial instability of form.16 In tracing the invention of new practices of body-shaping among the Pataxó, I wish to attend to the question put forward by Viveiros de Castro (1999) and framed by Carlos Fausto (2009: 498): ‘can we understand the reverse17 process of becoming an “authentic” Amerindian, normally interpreted as an expression of “postmodern identity politics”, in terms of Amerindian modes for producing transformation?’ My suggestion is that such ‘indigenous sociology’ (or ‘socio-logics’, as De Castro puts it) of incorporating alterity and its related process of kin-making – processo de aparentamento (Viveiros de Castro 1999: 196) – may be identified in several contexts of ‘ethnogenesis’ throughout the Brazilian north-east, whereby ‘the learning’ of how to perform particular practices or rituals (the Toré ritual being the most pregnant example) is accomplished via key alliances across indigenous peoples, broadly related as parentes of some kind, from whom a common repertoire of ‘lost’ indigenous lore can be (re) seized and (re)invented.18 My central argument is that the transformations undergone by the Pataxó can be seen to stem both from dynamics related to modern identity politics, in which the settling of cultural distinctiveness in terms of ethnic boundaries is vital, and from characteristically Amerindian sociological principles such as ‘potential affinity’ (Viveiros de Castro 2002: 152–27). Providing a key idiom for the articulation between the ‘localist introversion of kinship to the commerce with exteriority’ (Viveiros de Castro 2002: 157), potential affines are, par excellence, ‘other collectives with whom socially prescribed relations of symbolic exchange are effected’ (Viveiros de Castro 2002: 161). As indigenous peoples in Brazil increasingly articulate their struggles on common political platforms (such as the indigenous organizations, which have mushroomed at an incredible pace since the 1980s) and come to participate in national and international encounters, as they strengthen their contexts of interaction, the generic category of ‘Indian’, I suggest, has become a privileged trope for the effectuation of such ‘symbolic commerce’ across indigenous collectives.

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In the following, I explore the emergence of a movement of cultural canonization amidst the Pataxó marked by what I coin as an ethics of invention. This ethics posits the legitimacy of the Pataxó prerogative of being the artificers of their own (collectively agreed) canons of ‘cultural truth’. This culture in the making, however, is anything but ‘arbitrary’. The Pataxó themselves speak of ‘rescuing’ their culture, thus affirming a relationship with their ancestral past – even while its horizon is set on a culture for the future.

‘They Were so Hick, Our Little Adornments’: The Rise of an Image When I invited Nitxinawã to tell me of the olden days of Coroa Vermelha, she seemed to sense that words were lacking to do justice to what that world had been like. She grabbed a dusty box from a heap of materials she zealously kept in a wardrobe: books, old notebooks bearing sketches of abstract body painting motifs (including a drawing of a Kayapó depicting facial painting); scribblings of Pataxó language vocabulary; and above all photographs, most of which dated back to the late 1980s or early 1990s. The picture above instantly caught my eyes. The Pataxó in the photograph looked markedly different from the Pataxó as I had got to know them, reminding me just how much ‘culture’ had been redesigned since. ‘This was

Figure 1.1  Nayara and the dawn of ‘cultural rescue’ in Coroa Vermelha. Photograph by the author.

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in my mother’s house during the Indian Day here in Coroa’, she explained. ‘I don’t remember exactly when but it must have been somewhere in the 1990s, by the time of the Magistério Indígena’.19 These were the days when the Pataxó became central protagonists in a politics of national heritage commemoration. Located approximately 16 kilometres north of Porto Seguro, where Pedro Álvares Cabral’s ‘discovery’ expedition first dropped anchor on the Brazilian coast, Coroa Vermelha is the site of the iconic ‘First Eucharist’ celebrated on 26 April of 1500. The event, minutely described by the expedition cosmographer, Pero Vaz de Caminha (who mused at the natives’ mimesis of the ritual gestures of the Portuguese), was a milestone in the discovery of the new land, first named Terra de Vera Cruz – Land of the True Cross. Its natives were cast as peaceful, docile and innocent as Adam himself once had been. Their curious attitude towards the Mass20 signalled the ease of the colonial enterprise to come: there, ‘under the sign of the cross’, (Sampaio 2010 [1995]) Amerindians and Europeans would conjoin to make civilization in the tropics. Despite its symbolic relevance in the nation’s founding narratives, the coastal region of Porto Seguro was consigned to public oblivion for most of the twentieth century. Long a provincial village of fishermen, it was seized upon as a place of political importance during the 1970s, during the heyday of the military dictatorship. Building upon earlier state-based initiatives concerned with safeguarding and promoting the region as ‘the cradle of the nation’, in 1973 the historical sites of the ancient colonial province of Porto Seguro were declared a ‘National Monument’ and made available to touristic visitation in the following year via the inauguration of the BR367 highway. Constructed along the coastal region, the road further facilitated the promotion of Coroa Vermelha – then a forsaken, depopulated area – as a site for national heritage commemoration. To that end, a replica of the original wooden cross was erected next to the beach, and a grand theatrical enactment of the ‘discovery’ and the ‘First Mass’ was planned for its inauguration. According to the accounts of anthropologists and of Pataxó Indians themselves, the earliest migrations to Coroa Vermelha came about in that context: some Pataxó from Barra Velha 21 recall how they had been ‘invited by president Medici’ to play the part of the ‘discovery Indians’ in the event (Grünewald 2001: 124; Sampaio 2010 [1995]). Though modest, the coming of tourists to the region (mainly hippies and youngsters seeking the region’s beaches) prompted the development of a new means of livelihood for the Pataxó: the commercialization of handicrafts. Used to ploughing small gardens and crafting wooden utensils more directly related to their subsistence activities back in Barra Velha, the Pataxó from Coroa Vermelha became increasingly skilful at making decorative bows and arrows, seed-necklaces, feather adornments, wooden spears, troughs, plates and spoons for the emerging tourist

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market. Many recall how, during that time, upon hearing a car coming or one of those ‘pony-tailed hippies’ walking by, they would yell out loud ‘tourist coming!’, hastily grabbing their crafts from home and displaying them on the ­roadside. In the 1980s, as electrical supply reached Coroa Vermelha, the whole region of southern Bahia witnessed a considerable rise of  tourism, and increasing numbers of Pataxó families migrated to the area. The month of April became an increasingly heated one in Coroa Vermelha. Next to the already much celebrated ‘Indian Day’ on 19 April, the Pataxó assumed a central role in another annual celebration: the Auto do Descobrimento. Directed by an artistic association of Santa Cruz Cabrália since 1980 and performed by Pataxó Indians and professional actors at Coroa Vermelha’s beach on the 22 April, the date of ‘discovery’, this open-air theatrical play dramatized Cabral’s arrival and the ten days his expedition spent in Brazil, the gift exchanges between Portuguese and Amerindians, their subsequent interactions, and the celebration of the First Mass (Grünewald 1999: 172). While the Indian Day had always unfolded under the auspices of the Pataxó themselves, the Auto do Descobrimento performances increasingly featured the presence of statesmen and Catholic clergy. The ‘fame’ Coroa Vermelha achieved as the holy ground of the matrimony between Christianity and Brazilian nationhood was consecrated by the visit of former Pope John Paul II to the place in 1991. Then, Ubiraí’s deed was preceded by his father’s, Pajé Itambé, who gave a wooden spear to the pontiff on the occasion. In what swiftly became ‘a small historical theater of the national society’ (Sampaio 2010 [1995]: 127), the Pataxó were given the prominent – if burdensome – role of representing a­ utochthony to ever-widening gazes. Central to these public performances of Indianness was the figure of Nayara, sister of Nitxinawã (whom we see in the picture seated on the couch, sporting a white-feathered headdress) and a talented singer. During a two-year stay with her uncle in the village of Retirinho (Carmésia, in the state of Minas Gerais) in 1989–91, Nayara witnessed a series of initiatives led by Kanatyo, a local teacher, who had taken it upon himself to gather as many words of Pataxó language as the village elders could remember. Every morning, Kanatyo summoned the children to teach them new Pataxó words. With the vocabulary thus gathered, he began translating traditional Pataxó songs in Barra Velha hitherto sung in Portuguese to the Pataxó language, teaching kids how to sing and dance them ‘in the idiom’. With smiling eyes, Nayara rejoiced in those memories, recalling ‘how beautiful’ that all was, and how strong-minded she came back to Coroa Vermelha to develop similar initiatives. She taught the songs she learned to her brothers and sisters; her eldest, Karajá, became the cacique (chief) in the coming year of 1992, bringing the concern with ‘culture’ to the limelight in Coroa Vermelha. Though still a teenager, Nayara was appointed as Coroa Vermelha’s first ‘teacher of culture’, which thereupon became instituted

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as an official discipline of the indigenous school curriculum. ‘I always gathered them up, kids, youngsters and some adults, here, where the soccer field is today, for the rehearsals for Indian Day. We practised a lot for our upcoming presentations on the 19th April’. But in contrast with Retirinho – much to the regret of Nayara – the ‘cultural enthusiasm’ in Coroa Vermelha was restricted to the April celebrations. It wavered as soon as the month was over. ‘It was nothing like you see now’, she emphasized, and with a ‘just between you and me’ giggle, added: ‘They were so hick, our little adornments!’ Naraya’s activities as a ‘teacher of culture’ took place in a Coroa Vermelha that was witnessing the beginning of a rapid movement of urbanization. Youngsters were more interested in dancing forró, axé and other regional popular music than partaking in the rehearsals of Indian chanting and dancing. The Pataxó language was no longer fluently spoken by anybody, and as the eldest passed away, they carried with them the memory of words and other things ancient. Pataxó culture was ‘dormant’, as the Pataxó often told me, and people like Nayara thought it imperative to ‘rescue’ that which was still ‘rustling the leaves of memory’ (Taussig 1987: 373). Beyond ‘representing culture’ to a widening public of spectators in annually celebrated rituals of Indianness and nationhood, Nayara and her extended kin committed themselves to the task of making ‘culture’ a thing of the everyday.

The Jaqueira Reserve Although for reasons of space I will not delve into the long and sinuous process of land demarcation in Coroa Vermelha, it is important to highlight the emergence of a particular space for Pataxó ambitions to ‘rescue the culture’: the Jaqueira Reserve. In 1997, the Pataxó of Coroa Vermelha denounced the deforestation of the Atlantic Rainforest area neighbouring their village to the national environmental agency IBAMA, catching the employees of the corporation Gois-Coabita red-handed in their tractors. The Pataxó then settled in the area, claiming its demarcation as an indigenous territory. One year later, with the imminence of the celebration of the 500th anniversary of Brazil (year 2000) and the much reverberated brutal murder of the Pataxó Hã-hã-hãe Indian Galdino dos Santos in Brasília, 22 the Pataxó received the official homologation of Coroa Vermelha as Indigenous Territory, the document being handed over to them on the Indian Day celebration of 19 April 1998. 23 The coastal part of the land surrounding the historical locus of the ‘First Mass’ was designated for occupation by the Pataxó, whilst the Atlantic Forest area was demarcated as an area of environmental protection. Nayara and her extended family were at the forefront of the Jaqueira occupation. They aspired to seize that area as a new ground on which to pursue the ambition of ‘living the culture’ on a day-to-day basis, yet

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they did not quite know how to go about this. In fact, they all needed to go back to Coroa Vermelha at some point to work on their crafts, sell them and make a living. For a long time they went to the reserve just to spend the night chatting around the fire, hearing stories from the old ones, smoking their pipes, getting away from the noise and bustle of Coroa  Vermelha. One specific event, however, came to Nayara’s mind as decisive for their further mobilization to make of the Jaqueira a new village altogether: an encounter with other indigenous peoples promoted by the NGO Tribos Jovens on June 1998 in Rios Claros, São Paulo. Meeting the Kariri-Xocó Indians, Nayara inquired into their ritual practices, seeking to exchange experiences with them: ‘So they said that in their village they do the Ouricuri (ritual), in a more reserved area they had … for making their sacred rituals … So then I said: “we also have a place” … But there was nothing done here you know? There was nothing’. Nayara then decided to invite Tide, the shaman of the Kariri-Xocó, for a visit to the Jaqueira: We invited them on a late afternoon, turning night. When they arrived here they were thrilled … He [Tide] said this was a really strong place, had a really good energy, and it was the right place for us to make our rituals, to make the whole revival [revivência] of Pataxó culture. That we should fight for it and we would accomplish this … And he said: ‘Look, you just go for it, work for it and you will make it’. And it was then that we started – Our struggle. I said ‘look boys, we will do this, because we need to. Today we feel this need to come back to our traditions, our roots – because if we do not do this, if we do not have this concern for searching, or if we leave it just inside our heads, a time will come in which it will be all gone … We see that people are steadily losing interest in the culture, nobody wants to participate, no one has that yearning to search for the elders, to gather information … Nobody … So we have to fight for this, otherwise it will be all gone. And then how are we going to be seen? How will our history be told if nobody knows it? Later on, our children and grandchildren, how will they know about our origins, our history, who will know that? Nobody …

Named the ‘Jaqueira Reserve’, the place was immediately conceived as the ground on which the Pataxó would pursue their dream of ‘living the culture’ on a daily basis. They started building kijemes (houses in a traditional architectural style); dressing in tupisays (straw skirts), necklaces and bracelets; and experimenting daily with body painting motifs, crafting arm-bands and feathered headdresses. Long relinquished ritual practices towards forest and ancestral spirits, initially supported by the presence of the Kariri-Xocó, came to be undertaken once a week under the auspices of Nélson Saracura (former chief of the Pataxó Hã-hã-hãe). Elders cherished for their knowledge of old ways were constantly invited to spend the night around a fireplace, telling their tales – and, as I was often told, ‘smoothing their mouths’ with one or another sip of a liquor, eventually unleashing treasured, if concealed, memories. These concerned tragic, violent episodes experienced by themselves, their parents and grandparents, too

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Figures 1.2 and 1.3  The couple Syratã (teacher of culture) and Noêhmia at the Aragwaksã annual ritual at the Jaqueira Reserve in 2010 (the ritual commemorates the anniversary of the reserve). Though here they are specially adorned for the occasion, this very same aesthetic style can be witnessed daily at the Jaqueira. Photographs: Juari Pataxó. Published with permission.

painful to be often recalled. At other moments, to the amazement of all, they would suddenly come up with whole sentences in the old Pataxó language. Upon witnessing this, youngsters steadily realized the importance of having their notebooks and pencils at hand to scribble down the words and stories they heard. As Nayara had cautioned, when the old breathe their last breath they take away with them that all too precious, if evanescent, cultural world. 24

Researching and Defining ‘Culture’: Dynamics of Canonization If we pay further heed to Nitxinawã’s evocation of 1997 as a cultural dawn for the Pataxó, we will find a reference to another critical event: the Magistério Indígena. This programme sought to give university training to indigenous teachers through a partnership between the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), the Bahian Secretary of Education and the NGO Anaí. The rationale of this nationwide scheme was to involve indigenous peoples in their own educational programmes – which, in line with the National Education Plan, formalized in 1999, were to be bilingual and differentiated, foregrounding aspects of indigenous heritage such as language, historical memory and ceremonial and artistic manifestations. Joined in an unprecedented movement of networking and debate, the Pataxó teachers

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from several villages selected for the Magistério faced a common quandary: what is Pataxó cultural heritage? Jerry Matalawê, the then twenty-year-old husband of Nayara, who was selected for the programme alongside his wife and Nitxinawã, stated their challenge thus: We faced the need to understand our own cultural structure [sic]. Thus I thought: ‘well, what will I do here, what will I teach’, right? … [Throughout the course] I was taken by shock because I knew how to dance lambada and forró [popular music genres] but I no longer knew the Heruê, the Awê [Pataxó ritual dance] right? … I could not sing the songs in the [Pataxó] language, I knew some old ones in Portuguese but not in the language. And then I was struck because I did not have the skills, the rhythm of the dance and said, ‘Boy, what am I doing in this course again?’

In order to teach culture, Matalawê, Nayara and Nitxinawã needed first to research it. Bringing Roy Wagner’s intimation that every ‘native’ is also an ‘anthropologist’ full circle (Wagner 1981: 34; Viveiros de Castro 2013:475), the ‘cultural researchers’ of the Magistério began interviewing  their kin, especially those elders who were noted for their knowledge of past worlds, seizing from their recollections words from their language, as well as knowledge of crafting, medicine-making, ritual procedures and bodily adornments. Moreover, as they became acquainted with the academic body of knowledge already produced about them, they sought records of their past left in the colonial archives, accounts of nineteenth-century naturalist travellers and contemporary anthropologists (see Bakker 2013). In the company of Nayara and Nitxinawã, Anari was among the first Pataxó assigned to partake in the Magistério Indígena. While I was going through my second month of fieldwork in December 2009, she was undertaking her own research for her Masters in Ethnic Studies at the Federal University of Bahia. Anari asked me whether she could borrow my voice recorder for an interview with the teachers of culture from Coroa Vermelha (Awôy and Ajurú) and Jaqueira (Tawá). I asked if I could join her, and perhaps ask some questions too, to which she generously agreed. We were all about the same age, then nearing our thirties, and the conversation went on smoothly on the memories they held of that early time of the ‘first research group’, when they were all in their teenage years or early twenties. Anari, in her interview, stressed the rescuing of the Pataxó native language – the topic of her thesis. At one point, I asked what had plunged the Pataxó so decisively into this project of researching a ‘dormant’ culture, as they often phrased it. While I expected concerns related to the 500 years celebrations to surface, they instead talked about the Jaqueira Reserve and the creativity it afforded; its potential for inventing the ways of the Pataxó. Ajurú: So, just to reinforce Awôy’s point, part of this process already existed here in Coroa too, but yet it was … [pause] For example, as for painting. These

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were paintings that we [did], that were one to look, one could see it was a bit weak still, but with these developments of today you can see that several types of paintings have emerged, with ever stronger meanings – you can see that things have been changing so much, the adornments have too, the paintings, music too … Anari: The creativity, isn’t it? Ajurú: … the creativity. The creation of songs, the relationship with the cocar itself, the dress, the necklaces, earrings – so you see, several other adornments that before were not used – because, well, truth be told, before it was a bit – a little – a little inferior a bit [Anari breaks into laughter; giggling]. And you see that today, things have been evolving so much and today it is so beautiful, totally transformed due to this process of transformation and recognition of the work of the Reserve itself, you see? That made a whole lot to change, especially here in Coroa Vermelha …

Consider Ajurú’s words carefully. The older body paintings of the Pataxó, he says, were ‘still a bit weak’, a ‘little inferior’. But with the work put into the cultural rescue venture, several other types of paintings had emerged ‘with ever stronger meanings …’ I take such reference to the idiom of ‘strength’ to be twofold. On the one hand, Ajurú’s phrasing strikes a chord with what I have been stressing thus far about the persuasive power of the image, to aesthetics as force. On the other hand, it hints  at a movement of cultural canonization. Ajurú’s ‘ever stronger meanings’ further point to a sense of ‘solidity’: collectively debated, negotiated, and eventually authorized and consolidated canons of knowledge on what (painting motif) signifies what, what means what. For the ‘creativity’ cherished in the discourse of the teachers, be it noted, is certainly not ‘any creativity’, one that may easily lose sight of existing cultural repertoires of the past, neither one unconcerned with elderly consent (see also Svašek and Meyer, forthcoming). The new painting patterns that have been recently invented at the Jaqueira Reserve, as I shall further demonstrate, did not come ‘out of the blue’, as it were, but were based on patterns already grafted onto wood in their handicrafts. What Ajurú is signalling in the phrase ‘ever stronger meanings’, thus, is the process of recognition and authorization of a Pataxó culture-in-the-making by an elder generation. The anxiety that ‘creativity’ might fade into a chaotic, capricious series of ‘inventions’ came to the fore quite strongly in the words of Matalawê. He was of the opinion that there were far too many foreign influences on today’s bodily adornments, referring to the ever-transforming shapes, colours and materials deployed by today’s youngsters in the crafting of their bodies. Having graduated in Social Sciences at the State University of Mato Grosso along with Indian teachers from other ethnic backgrounds, Matalawê was much worried with what he coined ‘cultural spectacularization’, meaning the investment in appearance for appearance’s sake, bereft of a clear ‘consciousness’ as to what cultural forms are to signify or stand for. Aesthetic forms, he pleaded, begged for proper content – in this case,

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mythical content. And in order to convey that ideal model of aesthetics where forms are to function as unambiguous symbols of mythical referents, he referred to the Xavante Indians: I think that cultural patterns, for instance the earlobe stick, which is actually used by the Xavante. There, it is a sacred symbol. They use it because it represents the two Indians who represent the creation of the Xavante people. They use a special wood – not just anything. There is a special wood for it. That wood which every Xavante pierces, that represents their creators, you see? So that is a religious act, it is a sacred act. It is a special wood, not just anything you put there. So for me this is an admirable cultural expression. For me, to use anything anyway is of no good. So as I see it there is a need for us to reflect culturally, and I don’t mean just us Pataxó, because nowadays what I see is an image of the Indians copying each other. If you ever go to the Xingu, it is all becoming very much alike, the Xingu Indians are increasingly looking like one ethnic group, despite the actual diversity that exists. Fourteen peoples – and here, for instance, the Pataxó, who are the most influential image, you see that it influences the Tupinambá, the Pataxó Hã-hã-hãe, right? If you look at Bahia’s north, the Kiriri manage to influence the Pankararé, that is to say there is always one indigenous group with a stronger image which the others eventually paste onto themselves. We don’t need this! What we need is to evaluate our troncos [trunks, roots]. What is more, we must ask our ancestors for help, because it is possible. What we can’t do is introduce something from others into our culture and claim it is ours …

To be sure, Matalawê was not advocating here against creativity per se. After all, he and his peers of the Magistério research were veritable cultural demiurges, giving life to motifs of body paint for face and arms, which, following the publication Raízes e Vivências do Povo Pataxó (2005), became instituted as ‘Pataxó culture’. I take it that the critical  point put forward here is that creativity is valid, if not vital, to their  project of  cultural rescue, provided that it be rooted in Pataxó resources, in what he  calls ‘cultural reflexivity’. For instance, take the invented word  ‘Patxohã’, which  has been made to stand for their traditional language since approximately 1999. The word is a hybrid of the prefix Pat (from the ethnonym  Pataxó), ãtxohã (language) and xohã (warrior), meaning ‘the language of the warrior people’. While definitely a creation, the word is certainly not sheer invention, devoid of any reference to existing conventional words: it is precisely an invention built upon them. Many such new words came  into being via the aforementioned research enterprise, whose resources set the trail for their ‘re-signification’, as Matalawê described it. Among the words to enter the commonplace vocabulary of the Pataxó is Txôpai, the name of a mythical demiurge believed to have given rise to the Pataxó people, which was adopted to describe the Pataxó way of painting. In that far-off time preceding mankind, I was told by Matalawê and others, Txôpai conjured raindrops which, upon hitting the ground, became the first Pataxó Indians. For humans were made out of mud, water made

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Figure 1.4  Adjoined photographs of the Body Paint section of the didactic book Leituras Pataxó: Raízes e Vivências do Povo Pataxó nas Escolas (2005: 90, 91). Photograph by the author.

solid in soil – the same mud with which people joyfully clad theirs and their kin’s bodies in the climax of the Ritual of the Waters I came to witness in Retirinho village, made in homage to Txôpai. Now consider how the book provides the symbolic referentiality of each lining pattern through explanatory arrows indicating their meaning. Conceived of as the Pataxó’s originating and protective force, Txôpai’s symbol was made to graphically enter the motif of both male and female arm paintings as the bedrock line from which female motifs unfurl downwards, and upon which the parallel, vertical lines of men representing the ‘mother village’ of Barra Velha (in the centre) and those bred from it ascend. The triangular lining motif became aligned with manhood and held to symbolize ‘force’, ‘union’ and ‘protection’, whereas the diamondshaped lining came to stand for the ‘femininity’ of ‘balance’, ‘love’, and ‘protection’, both alternatively assuming the figure-ground position in male and female arm paintings. Parallel lines were granted the denotation of union, thus featuring as the rather more discrete facial painting motif for married Pataxó, whereas triangular, more vividly elaborated ones were given the symbolic task of identifying singles – that vibrancy taken as the medium to grapple with the sight of other singles. I should stress these are not my semiotic ‘readings’ of these painting motifs, but those displayed in canonical form in the school book authored by Pataxó teachers of culture. These references to their meaning are familiar to most people in Coroa Vermelha, being frequently deployed whenever

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people are questioned about the meaning of their body p ­ ainting – a question that left many Pataxó in earlier times stuttering. In this carefully conventionalized discourse, cultural forms are unambiguously given a ‘meaning’ and a ‘function’ (identifying men and women, married and single), thus scaffolding such motifs as distinctively Pataxó. As to Matalawê’s additional remarks on the mimetic impulses one encounters across indigenous peoples in Brazil, to my mind they seem to point at an intriguing aesthetic dynamic in the ‘representational economy’ (Keane 2007) of Indianness. Wherever one goes, he lamented, one finds ‘one indigenous group with a stronger image which the others eventually paste onto themselves!’ I have quite often witnessed this Pataxó unease at seeing their aesthetic features being seized by neighbouring indigenous peoples such as the Tupinambá, whose more recent institutional recognition by the state and national society at large has prompted them, much like the Pataxó, to boost the status of their image via body aesthetics. As part of that movement, they have incorporated forms of adornment (such as the straw skirts) for which the Pataxó have become renowned. 25 But then again, the Pataxó too marvel at and inspire themselves in the visual effulgence of Indians such as Kayapó and Xavante – commencing hitherto non-native practices such as lip, nose and earlobe piercing with bulky sticks, crafting and dressing splendidly colourful cocares, making genipapo paint and lending their bodies as canvas to ingenious shapes bearing mythical referents. Where Viveiros de Castro suggested the notion of a ‘symbolic economy of alterity’ to address the pregnancy of the problem of affinity in Amazonian sociopolitical regimes, what here comes to my mind is something like an ‘aesthetic economy of cultural authority’: a hierarchical gradient of aesthetic styles and their differential ‘symbolic capital’, to recall Bourdieu’s (1977) concept  – ‘there is always one indigenous group with a stronger image which the others eventually paste onto themselves …’ Clearly, what comes to the fore in the discourse of Matalawê – who spearheaded much of the debate surrounding what ‘Pataxó culture’ was and what its ‘rescue’ could (and should) be in that initial research group of 1998 – is a sense of morality in the act of cultural invention (that ‘half of the world of meaning’, to remember Wagner’s (1981:40) way of putting the dialectic of convention-invention). To invent arbitrarily is obviously wanting for, as Wagner asserts: ‘every meaningful invention must involve both a conventional and a nonconventionalized context’ (Wagner 1981: 46), their successful articulation being the foundation of invention itself. If the Pataxó did not have a conventional orientation towards elaborate forms of body painting, that orientation was sought by Matalawê and his peers upon an existing conventional context: the graphic motifs carved on wooden utensils back in Barra Velha, already ‘re-invented’ in the new context of decorative handicrafting in Coroa Vermelha. It was precisely to the ‘new context’ afforded by the Jaqueira Reserve, one eventually

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Figure 1.5  Syratã pyrographing a wooden peão with the Pataxó male motif. Note the creative insertion of that motif between the parallel lines on his facial painting (of married men). Photograph by the author.

providing the Pataxó with a space to ‘indulge in culture’ on a daily basis, which the teachers of culture insistently referred in their discussion of the whys and hows of their cultural transformations: in this case, the uprooting of these graphic motifs from objects to bodies, from wood to skin. As the introduction of this volume suggests, if a successful aesthetics of persuasion depends upon its potential to rouse a sensuous continuity between selves and material objects, between collectives and particular cultural forms, the Pataxó seem to present precisely such a case here. Indeed, the book Raízes e Vivências, authored by Matalawê and his colleagues, can be seen as the reflexive body of articulation between those discontinuous contexts (their obviation in the Wagnerian sense), providing an inventive objectification of ‘Pataxó culture’ and, simultaneously, the means for its further collectivization. In its provision of new, stabilized conventions of cultural form, the book eloquently expresses an ethics of invention in which the institution of a novel cultural form as Pataxó culture requires a ‘cultural reflexivity’ able to embed the novelty into a distinctive Pataxó ancestral reference. The force of the aesthetic must be seen to stem not only from sheer form, but from its grounding in a distinctively Pataxó creative potential. No wonder that the figure thus elected as most suitable to symbolically stand for such creative grounding was the demiurge of the Pataxó people, Txôpai.

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The ethical vector expressed by Matalawê points inwards as much as it does outwards: to both ‘Pataxó culture’ and to ‘other indigenous peoples’, and to the newly experienced contexts of their interaction. When I asked the teachers of culture whether their relationship with other indigenous peoples was of any significance for them in their recent aesthetic redesigns, Awôy answered: Whenever our kin here would go out to meet with kin of other ethnicities [parentes de outras etnias], they would see them painted, their paintings, no?  And then many of them would also reproach us for not having [body] painting … and from that sprung this interest in researching this issue of painting more, of searching, no? How it used to be … then we searched for that. I remember we organized a meeting to see which type of painting we were using, and which we would use, right? And then it became settled that the paintings we would use to identify the Pataxó people would be those [motifs] we already did, as Tawá said, in handicraft fabric, carved in the wooden spears, in the bajaú, which are those in triangular shapes, on the body … which is still today the painting, the one that identifies the Pataxó people, isn’t it? And from that it evolved more and more, the boys at the reserve, Aponé began searching … we began searching into nature itself, you see? Aponé found a beetle at the Jaqueira with the paintings, and then he began copying that beetle painting and passing it onto the body, to paint on the body, no? And then today you see those very detailed paintings thanks to this beetle Aponé found at the Jaqueira, you see – and those are paintings taken directly from nature itself, from observing nature and painting the body … but all this evolution is due to these encounters [with other Indians] and also because of the necessity itself of the [Pataxó] people, all the more so for the youngsters wanting to embellish themselves [‘Yes! That’s it!’ Anari concurred] for calling the attention of other kin in those encounters – right?

Awôy zigzags between two sets of key events. First, we learn from him that ‘other kin’ (other indigenous peoples) ‘reproached’ the Pataxó for not displaying detailed body paint styles in the indigenous encounters in which they increasingly came to partake from the 1990s onwards.26 Second, he refers to a ‘beetle painting’ style developed by Aponé at the Jaqueira Reserve. Allow me to dwell briefly on the first, for to neglect the lively stories they related to me of their participation in the Jogos dos Povos Indígenas would be to betray the overwhelming sense of importance they seemed to confer to these events. The first participation of the Pataxó in the Jogos was in October 2000 – not coincidentally the year when they were brought into the limelight of the ‘discovery’ celebrations in Porto Seguro. According to a handful of accounts I heard, this was also the year when they became acquainted with the technique of body painting with genipapo27 dye. Following the 2000 Jogos, the Pataxó participated in virtually all subsequent events. 28 I will not soon forget the expression of dismay with which Jandaya returned from the 2011 Jogos in Porto Nacional (Tocantins). ‘We are encountering too much prejudice, André’, she lamented. ‘Now it is not so much as before, but I was too sad to hear comments like “Oh, look at those

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blacks playing capoeira there!”, pointing at our boys …’ Her son Syratã, teacher of culture at the Jaqueira (and a very talented soccer player), also spoke of  such initial aloofness from other Indians towards the Pataxó. ‘Holy Mary!’, he exclaimed, when I asked him about his first experiences in the games: In the beginning they did not interact much with us. When we entered the stadium [for the soccer matches] they’d be silent. But with time, after they saw us playing and winning matches, everyone was already cheering for us! When we entered to play, the whole crowd would start chanting ‘Pataxó, muká mukaú, muká mukaú …’ They even learned our song! You had to see those Xinguanos [a term used to refer broadly to all the peoples from the Xingú National Park] coming to me saying ‘Oh Pataxó! Come to my village in Xingú whenever you want, you are welcome to stay there as long as you like!

Tawá, Jandaya’s nephew, was also keen on these events. But while most boys of his age were thrilled to interact and flirt with girls from other peoples, he would seek the company of their elders to smoke some tobacco together and hear their stories – interested, as he had always been, in spiritual matters. He too emphasized the progressive warming of relations with these other peoples: how these elders taught him so much of the shamanic affairs of which the elders of Coroa Vermelha lacked intimate knowledge. The Jogos was also a major occasion for exchanging adornments with other Indians, either by buying or selling or through gift exchanges. Syratã, for example, was given a beautiful jaguar leather belt by the Xinguano he defeated in wrestling; whilst a long, luxuriant blue macaw-feathered cocar, I heard, was bought by a Pataxó for a significant sum of money. One of Tawá’s stories, though, is specially telling in regard to this new-found context of interaction. Tawá and Juari were interacting with the Enawenê-Nawê Indians, whom they met at the 2002 Jogos and later re-encountered at the 2003 and 2004 events. Known for his charisma and playfulness, Juari soon won their sympathy, and was invited to have his hair cut in the Enawenê-Nawê style. At that point a Xavante Indian was passing by and, upon witnessing the scene, shouted to the Enawenê-Nawê: ‘Watch out parente [kin]! You have to watch out for those Pataxó … Pataxó are thieves! They will steal your culture and take it to their village to say it is theirs, because they have no culture of their own!’ Later, to his surprise, Juari discovered that he had actually been given a wedding haircut. Manifesting that ambivalent tone of amiability and hostility so emblematic of ‘potential affines’, while the Pataxó were nourishing their aparentamento (kin-making) with the Enawenê-Nawê, this Xavante deliberately disavowed them as parentes. This was not the case with Aponé’s exchanges with the Yawalapití in the 2007 Jogos. He took pleasure in recalling being invited by the Yawalapití cacique (chief) to paint the body of his daughter, while receiving Yawalapití painting on his own body. With his fingers travelling across the dirt he

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Figure 1.6  Cultural traffic: Ariema (right) at the Kuikuro village in the Xingu National Park. Photograph printed with permission of Ariema Pataxó.

would draft their motifs, telling me how well he remembered a pintura Xinguana (Xinguan painting), how he could replicate it if he wished. But it dawned on me the reverse was also true when in 2013 I saw a photograph taken by Ariema, Juari’s sister, at a Kuikuro village in the Xingú National Park, where she had stayed for a couple of days. The picture featured her and a Pataxó friend decorated with the Kuikuro painting hugging a Kuikuro Indian, his body decorated with the very painting Aponé had made on a Yawalapití woman six years earlier. As previously mentioned, Aponé had developed a unique style of body paint taken from the back of a beetle he had found at the Jaqueira Reserve. Assuming he had not been at the occasion, I congratulated Ariema for making that ‘beetle painting’ on the Kuikuro so well. Her response, in a very matter of fact tone was: ‘I didn’t do anything, they did it themselves. They already knew the beetle painting’. 29 The ‘matter-of-factness’ of Ariema’s reply brings home to us that the ‘beetle painting’ developed by Aponé has become an easily recognizable convention – notwithstanding its very recent invention. What is more, it became so far beyond the spatial confines of Coroa Vermelha or other Pataxó villages, being easily identifiable and reproducible by the Kuikuro – those much admired índios Xinguanos – as ‘the Pataxó painting’. What Ariema and also Awôy bring to bear in their talk is that constant dialectic tension between convention and invention, invention and convention: that ‘collectivizing’ motivation Awôy signals as he mentions the need felt by the Pataxó to ‘organize a meeting’ and ‘settle’ which paintings they would use to ‘identify the Pataxó people’; and the subsequent movement of ‘differentiation’ brought about by the new context of creativity afforded by the Jaqueira Reserve, allowing for the unique shapes of a beetle to feature on

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Pataxó skins. ‘When a symbol is used in some nonconventional way’, suggests Wagner, ‘the act of symbolization can only be referred to an event – the act of invention in which form and inspiration come to figure each other’ (1981: 43). As I have suggested earlier, in relation to the inventive transition of painting motifs from wood to the body, here too the discontinuity of contexts (their greater or lesser conventionality) must be obviated in the process of symbolization: the new-found form (the beetle) does not fully eclipse existing conventional forms, as it is made to enter them, incorporating some elements as it introduces new ones – as in a continuous, mutually inflecting ‘figure-ground’ reversal (Wagner 2010: 368). How did that invention – and its continuous movement of ­conventionalization – come about?

Aponé, the Beetle and the Dialectic of Invention-Convention As is usually the case with deft image-crafters, Aponé was an image enthusiast. As night fell at the Jaqueira Reserve, he would spend countless hours in front of the TV set, watching DVD after DVD: from Jackie Chan movies to machine-gun style action and spectacular special effect thrillers; from Tupac’s hip-hop or local Bahian popular hit video clips to films depicting ‘North American Indians’ or ‘uncontacted tribes’, such as The Emerald Forest (1985) or Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto (2006). His keenness on visuals first dawned on me when he peered into the Tristes Trópicos (Lévi-Strauss 2007 [1955]) I was reading during my earliest nights at the Jaqueira. He asked what that book was about, and as soon as I told him it was about Brazilian indigenous peoples who were visited by a French anthropologist in the 1930s, and whose impressive painting motifs had been captured in beautiful photographs, he was all eyes. As I saw him carefully studying the Kadiwéu’s notoriously complex facial painting motifs, I decided to offer him some photocopies of the book’s photographs. Later, at the copy shop, as I glanced through those pages where the Kadiwéu had drawn their motifs on white sheets instead of human faces, an afterthought came to me: why not echo Lévi-Strauss’ method here? Why not provide Aponé with some sheets and pencils, and invite him to draw an image of that creature that inspirited his creation of a new body paint style? It took me almost a year to see these drawings come to life. Through our football matches, occasional firewood pickups, and daily conviviality at the Jaqueira Reserve, I became quite close to Aponé, his wife and daughters. In the spirit of farewells, just before I was departing from fieldwork, he presented me with the eighteen white sheets I had given him, on which he had worked out abstract drawings of chest and back paintings for men and women, with varying amalgamations of lines that nevertheless all followed the logic of the same pattern. Among these drawings was a reproduction of the Jaqueira beetle. It was another run-of-the-mill day when, upon returning from the bushes where he had been chopping wood, Aponé noticed this beetle landing on

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Figure 1.7  Motif variations of body painting (male, chest). Drawing: Aponé Pataxó. Published with permission.

Figure 1.8  Motif variations of body painting (male, back). Drawing: Aponé Pataxó. Published with permission.

Figure 1.9  Motif variations of body painting (female, chest). Drawing: Aponé Pataxó. Published with permission.

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Figure 1.10  Female body painting (back). Drawing: Aponé Pataxó. Published with permission.

one of the trunks he had brought along. Taken by its eye-catching composition of curvaceous, symmetric alignments, Aponé grabbed a glass jar and encased it therein for a few days, first drawing these motifs on paper, then experimenting on the skin of his kin at the Jaqueira. As far as Aponé remembered, that happened somewhere between the year 2000 and 2001 – a couple of years after the emergence of the Jaqueira as a village. Yet it is interesting to note that the style he developed did not feature as ‘Pataxó body paint’ in the book edited by Matalawê and his colleagues from the Magistério, published in 2005. Aponé and his sisters, Nayara, Jandaya and Nitxinawã related to me how the Pataxó from the Jaqueira Reserve first displayed these body paintings publicly during their participation in events such as ‘Indian Day’ in Coroa Vermelha and subsequent ‘discovery celebrations’ – events which, like the Aragwaksã commemorating the Jaqueira’s Reserve anniversary or the Ritual of the Waters made in homage to Txôpai in Retirinho previously alluded to, would steadily articulate Pataxó Indians from several villages in joint celebrations. They were jubilant upon recalling their ‘immense success’: the impact of the new painting style on other Pataxó attendees, a ‘Jaqueira style’ that became greatly sought after by young boys and girls from Coroa Vermelha and other villages, keen to have their bodies painted by Aponé and to master the beetle pattern. Thereafter, the ‘beetle painting’ steadily expanded, moving from being a ‘Jaqueira style’ to being a ‘Coroa Vermelha style’ to being a ‘Pataxó style’, featuring on Pataxó bodies as they came to

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Figure 1.11  The Jaqueira beetle. Drawing: Aponé Pataxó. Published with permission.

Figure 1.12  Aponé painting Juari for his wedding ceremony. Photograph by the author.

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participate in broad interethnic encounters such as the Jogos Indígenas. As the eruptive force of invention surfaced over a recently established convention, new conventional arrangements were called for. It is thus that, following that initial mobilization of the ‘research group’ formed by the Magistério Indígena, cultural teachers and researchers from several Pataxó villages continually sustained their efforts at collectivizing clear-cut standards of ‘Pataxó culture’. In 2007, teachers from Bahia and Minas Gerais organized a first meeting to debate, negotiate and agree upon certain canons on Pataxó language, history and culture. Two years later, a new meeting was set up in Salvador, and the Atxohã coordination group was created to coordinate documentation and research on Pataxó language and history. I had the chance to witness their second meeting in 2010, during the Ritual of the Waters hosted in Retirinho, Minas Gerais, which gathered Pataxó Indians from Pé do Monte, Barra Velha, Guaxúma, Coroa Vermelha, Aldeia Velha, Imbiriba and Boca da Mata. An audience made of Pataxó elders, teachers and students heard the members of the Atxohã coordination group present their research and its outcomes in an academicstyle setting including microphones and PowerPoint presentations. In their slides, the section on ‘Pataxó body paint’ featured the style developed by Aponé in conjunction with the previously agreed pattern of geometric forms: the former featuring on chest and back, the latter on face and arms. Sitting next to me was a teacher from Imbiriba; his body, like the abstract sketches I could not help noticing in his notebook, featured a further twist in that pattern: the insertion of the geometric forms at the back, right at the

Figures 1.13 and 1.14  The designing of Pataxó bodies at the Ritual of the Waters in Retirinho village in 2010. Photographs by the author.

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middle point from which the symmetric, curvaceous alignments developed by Aponé unfurled. Some of Aponé’s own drawings had also deployed that innovation. It was around that tenuous interstice between conventionally accepted forms of cultural creativity and unruly ‘inventions’ that the debate followed between audience and the ‘cultural demiurges’ of the Atxohã group. ‘What do we do’, some asked, ‘when our kids come up with all too different ways of adorning their bodies? Should we let their creativity flourish, or should we bind them to a standard?’ The demiurges had no ready answers for them; their only plea was that these kids learn what ‘Pataxó painting’ is like and what it means, that they know their heritage – its ‘make-ability’ notwithstanding. Just as they once rested in Aponé’s hands, the brushes of ‘culture’ were now being passed on to the next generation. Reminiscent of Benjamin’s ‘dialectical image’, images such as the one crafted by Aponé are created by a continual principle of ‘montage’: across convention and invention, they do not rise as a radical beginning or conform to a hermetic ending. In the poetic phrasing of Taussig (1987: 370), they ‘are created by the author but are also already formed, or halfformed, so to speak, latent in the world of the popular imagination, awaiting the fine touch of the dialectical imagician’s wand’. The central ethical motivation underpinning the Pataxó in their quest for rousing culture from its ‘dormancy’, ‘rescuing’ while ‘reinventing’ its forms, is apparent in Matalawê’s plea for a certain form of control: ‘what we have to do is evaluate our troncos (ancestry)’. It was all there, and it was possible – the point being to arouse, like Aponé’s beetle painting, ‘the slumbering power of material already there awaiting the copula of the magician’s touch’ (Taussig 1987: 370).

Conclusion Now, what are we to make anthropologically of the power of the aesthetic? Taking ‘aesthetics’ beyond the sphere of the arts and the beautiful and into the realm of the senses, a host of scholars in recent years have returned to Aristotle’s understanding of aisthesis as ‘our total sensory experience of the world and our sensitive knowledge of it’ (Verrips 2006: 27; see also Csordas 1994; Pinney 2004; Hirschkind 2006; Meyer 2009). Birgit Meyer proposes an understanding of aesthetics as particular ‘grammars’ of sensing (Meyer 2006: 22), historically situated regimes of sensitivity yielded by socially authorized modes of addressing and tuning the senses in particular ways. Not unlike the Foucauldian understanding of power ‘wielding itself’ through the subject, modulating and honing its sensibility, eliciting the body to lend itself to the true and the beautiful, aesthetics is here understood as cardinal to processes of world-making, the indispensable sensuous mediation to the rendering of particular subjectivities, lifeworlds and collectivities.

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If one takes such a sensorial perspective on heritage dynamics and its attendant politics of authentication, then the power of aesthetics to render ‘culture’ present in the body is indeed striking. As I sought to demonstrate throughout this chapter (recall the episodes of Wynatã’s bow and arrow and Ubiraí’s cocar), the ‘reading’ of Indian bodies is mediated by a ‘grammar of sensing’: an aesthetics deeply predicated on the persuasive power of specific semiotic forms such as vibrantly coloured featherwork; elaborate motifs of body paint; thick piercing of labia and lobes; necklaces, armbands and anklets made of animal teeth, claws or seeds. These forms play a central role in a ‘representational economy’ of authentic Indianness: a semiotic field wherein actors, often from diverging institutional realms and ontological orientations, find themselves implicated. The Pataxó people, long consigned to the status of caboclos, ‘Indian descendants’ or ‘Indians-who-lost-their culture’, became increasingly implicated in a field of heritage politics in which such forms, as symbolic tropes capable of indexing conventional perceptions of ‘cultural integrity’ (Conklin 1997) or authenticity in a modern ontological register, are critical. And yet, to recall Viveiros de Castro’s paraphrasing of Levi-Strauss’ critique of functionalism: ‘to say there is no indigenous society outside of a contact situation with the national society is a truism; to say, however, that everything in that society can be explained by that contact situation is absurd’ (Viveiros de Castro 1999: 164; my translation). This other side of the story, as I have signalled in the introduction, is what Amerindian ‘traditions of invention’ may bring to our understanding. Following Wagner, my point is that modern identity politics and Amerindian traditions of invention stand in a dialectical relationship of simultaneous contradiction and interdependence – dialectic here in the sense of ‘a tension or dialogue-like alternation between two conceptions or viewpoints that are simultaneously contradictory and supportive of each other’ (Wagner 1981: 52). Contradictory, for while modern ‘conventional controls’ are oriented towards the neat stabilization of difference in discrete ‘identity’ forms, characteristically Amerindian ‘traditions of invention’ deliberately orient their controlling efforts towards a continuous differentiation from a conventional backdrop of similarity (what Wagner refers to as ‘differentiating traditions’). What I have shown is that these two perspectives on invention are ineluctably intertwined – for, notwithstanding the ‘uncontrolled equivocations’ that may sprout across their ontological dissonance, they still find each other implicated around the ‘culture’ homonym.30 Thus the Pataxó’s central concern with boundary-making – the outlining of a ‘Pataxó style’ of body paint based on a distinctively Pataxó ancestral reference – and thus, too, one can make sense of their mimesis of other indigenous peoples, their creative impetus in relation to so many things previously foreign to their lifeworld. In producing new forms and practices of adorning the body throughout the events evinced in this chapter, the Pataxó express their simultaneous

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drive to incorporate things foreign and to delineate strict canons of ‘Pataxó culture’. This is what the ethics of invention I sought to convey in this chapter is all about: controlling the relationship between the conventionally inherited and the creatively invented in the making of a desired image – an image able to evoke past and future simultaneously. The touchstone value of this ethics is that this image be seen as grounded on an ancestral reference even as it is created in the present and aimed at generations to come. Like Benjamin’s dialectician, whose words are sails blown by the winds of world history – ‘it is the way they are set that matters’31 – the Pataxó too seek to manoeuvre their own sails, wafting on ancestral winds even as they navigate overseas. André Werneck de Andrade Bakker is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the Free University of Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam) and is currently a lecturer at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (through the University Studies Abroad Consortium Program) and at the University of the South of Santa Catarina (UNISUL), Brazil. His dissertation focuses on the entanglement between cultural heritage formation and conversion to Pentecostal Christianity among the Pataxó Indians (Bahia, Brazil). His main publications, fields of research and teaching experience are the anthropology of religion and of Christianity, Amerindian ethnology and media studies.

Notes   1. CEDI (1984: 293) apud Conklin (1997: 727).  2. The ethnological literature identifies two main territorial clusters of the Pataxó Indians: the ‘Meridional Pataxó’, situated towards the extreme south of Bahia between the northern margin of the São Mateus river and the river of Santa Cruz Cabrália; and the ‘Septentrional Pataxó’, identified as Pataxó Hã-hã-hãe, situated between the rivers Rio de Contas and Rio Pardo (Carvalho 2008: 19–20).  3. Folha da Tarde (4 September 1984) cited in Vilaça (2000: 61).   4. For contrasting takes on the episode see Conklin (1997) and Vilaça (2000), who respectively foreground the political bearing of Western and Amerindian perspectives on the body in their analyses.   5. I draw the notion of ‘semiotic form’ from Webb Keane. Distancing himself from the classic Saussurean tradition of abstracting the virtual properties of semiotic systems, Keane foregrounds the materiality of signs and their relative capacity to address the senses in particular ways (Keane 2007: 5–6). My take on ‘semiotic form’ here thus refers to the variety of material forms pregnant with the potential of (dis)avowing notions of ‘Indian authenticity’ – in other words, to an aesthetics of persuasion (Meyer 2010; see Introduction to this volume) of authentic Indianness.   6. This account is based on the description of the episode by an anthropologist colleague of Conklin who attended the event.   7. Being the earliest front of colonial penetration in Brazil, the north-east region was the target of a systematic policy of ‘Indian integration’ during the nineteenth century that included declarations of war against hostile groups, the creation of new missionary settlements and public incentives to interethnic marriages between Indians and non-Indians (Carvalho and Carvalho 2011). The 60-plus settlements of 27 different

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indigenous peoples identified during the eighteenth century in the region were officially deemed ‘extinct’ by the end of the nineteenth century (Dantas, Sampaio and Carvalho 1992), and the term caboclos (rather than ‘Indians’) to designate these populations steadily gained more currency in Brazilian society. For an in-depth analysis of these state-driven strategies of ‘ethnocide’ and the later movement of ‘ethnogenesis’ taking place in the north-east during the twentieth century, see Arruti (2000).   8. As Arruti puts it, these are peoples who ‘fail to exhibit the characteristics the term (‘Indian’) conjures up in the popular as well as the educated imaginary. An imaginary nourished by the archetype of the Amazonian Indian or those of the Xingu, inhabitants of the rainforest, preferably nomadic and nude, possessing only an elementary technology and a religion and language of their own’ (Arruti 2000: 97).  9. Photograph by Guito Moreto on the cover of O Globo newspaper, 19 June 2012. 10. Bixa Orellana, a plant whose vibrant red fruit is used for making body paint dye among various Amerindian peoples. 11. O Globo magazine, 1 July 2012, pp. 20–21. 12. Pero Vaz de Caminha authored the historic letter to the King of Portugal announcing the ‘discovery’ of Brazil and the ‘first contact’ with Amerindians in 1500. 13. My translation from ‘Os Pataxó, o Papa e a Umbanda’, available at http://g1.globo. com/platb/yvonnemaggie/tag/papa/ 14. Since the second half of the twentieth century, more than twenty ethnic groups of the Brazilian north-east who were previously deemed extinct have been institutionally recognized by FUNAI (Brazil’s Indian Affairs Foundation), while claims to land demarcation and general state assistance by twelve more groups are still under assessment (see Oliveira Filho 2004, 2005). 15. An expressive instance of this analytical trend can be found in the volumes edited by Oliveira Filho (2004) and Grünewald (2005). 16. A concern with the body and its ‘make-ability’ through both ritualized and everyday practices (i.e. sharing of body fluids, food consumption and spatial conviviality) has acquired a paramount value in this tradition in both an ontological and sociological key (see Vilaça 2002, 2005). 17. By ‘reverse’, Fausto means ‘becoming Indian’ as the reverse of ‘becoming Other’ in Amerindian ontologies. 18. For instances of this dynamic see Grünewald (2004: 151–52, note 24), Oliveira Filho (2004: 27–35) and Arruti (2000). 19. A programme designed to provide indigenous teachers with university education (see following section: ‘The Jaqueira Reserve’). 20. See Viveiros de Castro’s (2002: 191–96) fascinating critique of traditional anthropological takes on ‘culture’, ‘religion’ and ‘belief’ for understanding the meaning of the relationship between the sixteenth-century Tupinambá with the alterity incarnated by Europeans at large and Jesuit missionaries in particular. 21. Barra Velha is referred to by the Pataxó as their ‘mother-village’, the matrix from whence the several migrations that have come to form the present territorial distribuition of Pataxó villages first sprang. 22. Galdino was burned alive by a group of affluent, upper-class youngsters while sleeping at a bus stop. He travelled to the capital during that year’s Indian Day celebration to plead for a resolution of the Caramurú-Paraguassú Reserve litigation (begun back in the 1980s, with the Parliamentary Inquiry led by Deputy Mario Juruna evoked in the Introduction). 23. It is worth pointing out that in 1999, one year before the celebration of Brazil’s 500th anniversary, the Discovery Coast Atlantic Forest Reserves was included in UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites.

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24. For reasons of space I will not dwell further upon the emergence of the Jaqueira Reserve as ‘cultural space’ (see Bakker 2013). Yet it is important to underline that from early on it became conceived as a space open to touristic visitation, and that the continual presence of tourists as contemplating Others formed a crucial part of a productive dialectic with the Pataxó’s own quest to rouse ‘culture’ from its ‘dormancy’. As Comaroff and Comaroff (2009: 26–29) rightly point out, the key ambivalence in the touristic performance of culture is precisely the blurring of boundaries between producers and consumers: in objectifying Pataxóness to these Others the Pataxó were also objectifying it to themselves; with the Jaqueira – and its everyday audience – this verve of bodily beautification was dislodged from a ritual momentum of national heritage celebration to a daily practice. 25. An anthropologist colleague working with the Tupinambá once shared her impression with me of the Pataxó as ‘the cicerones of the indigenous Northeast’. 26. The original form of the term used by Awôy was ‘eles cobravam’, which in this context implies a blending of ‘demand’ (to have such a style) and ‘reproach’ (for their lack). 27. Fruit with whose nectar one produces a dye that remains on the body for nearly twenty days. Previously, the Pataxó had used coal (black) and urucum (red) dye only. 28. See http://www.esporte.gov.br/index.php/institucional/esporte-educacao-lazer-einclusao-social/jogos-indigenas. 29. Instantiating a progressive bonding between the Pataxó and the Kuikuro, the latter attended the 2014 edition of the Jogos Indígenas Pataxó (undertaken every year following their first participation in the National Games in 2000). 30. On the issue of ontology, alterity and equivocation, see Viveiros de Castro (2004). For a similar argument around the relationship between the Ocamo Yanomami and the Venezuelan state healthcare system, see Kelly (2011). 31. Benjamin apud Taussig (1993: 70).

References Arruti, J.M. 2000. ‘From “Mixed Indians” to “Indigenous Remainders”: Strategies of Ethnocide and Ethnogenesis in Northeastern Brazil’, in W.  Assies, G. van der Haar and A. Hoekema (eds), The Challenge of Diversity – Indigenous Peoples and Reform of The State in Latin America. Amsterdam: Thela Thesis, pp. 97–122. Bakker, A. 2013. ‘De l’Emplacement de la Culture: Hétérotopie et Formation Esthétique dans le Réserve Pataxó de la Jaqueira’, Brésil(s): Sciences Humaines et Sociales 3: 69–88. Barth, F. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company. Benjamin, W. 1969. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in H. Arendt (ed.), Illuminations. New York: Schocken, pp. 253–64. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cardoso de Oliveira, R. 1964. O índio e o mundo dos brancos. São Paulo: Pioneira. Carvalho, M.R. 2008. ‘Os Pataxó Meridionais: Uma Breve Recensão Histórico-Bibliográfica’ in Agostinho da Silva, P. et al (eds) Tradições

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Étnicas entre os Pataxó no Monte Pascoal: Subsídios para uma Educação Diferenciada e Práticas Sustentáveis. Vitória da Conquista: Edições UESB, pp. 15–43. Carvalho, M.R. and A.M. Carvalho. 2011. ‘Introduction’, in M.R. Carvalho and A.M. Carvalho (eds), Índios e Caboclos: A História Recontada. Salvador: EDUFBA, pp. 13–28. Centro Ecumênico de Documentação e Informação (CEDI). 1984. Povos Indigenas no Brasil/1984. Aconteceu Especial 15. São Paulo. Comaroff, J. and J. Comaroff. 2009. Ethnicity Inc. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Conklin, B. 1997. ‘Body Paint, Feathers, and VCRs: Aesthetics and Authenticity in Amazonian Activism’, American Ethnologist 24(4): 711–37. Csordas, T. 1994. Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dantas, B.G., J. Sampaio and M.R. Carvalho. 1992. ‘Os Povos Indígenas no  Nordeste Brasileiro: Um Esboço Histórico’, in M. Cunha (ed.), História dos Índios no Brasil. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, pp. 431–56. Fausto, C. 2000. ‘Of Enemies and Pets: Warfare and Shamanism in Amazonia’, American Ethnologist 26(4): 933–56. ———. 2009. ‘Commentary to Santos-Granero, F: “Hybrid Bodyscapes: A Visual History of Yanesha Patterns of Cultural Change”’, Current Anthropology 50(4): 497–98. Galvão, E. 1979. ‘Áreas Culturais Indígenas do Brasil: 1900/1959’, in E.  Galvão (ed.), Encontro de Sociedades. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, pp. 193–228. Gow, P. 1991. Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Grünewald, R. 1999. ‘Os Índios do Descobrimento: Tradição e Turismo’, PhD dissertation. Rio de Janeiro, Museu Nacional. ———. 2001. Os Índios do Descobrimento: Tradição e Turismo. Rio de Janeiro: Contra Capa. ———. 2004. ‘Etnogênese e “Regime de Índio” na Serra do Umã’, in J.P.  Oliveira Filho (ed.), A Viagem da Volta: Etnicidade, Política e Reelaboração Cultural no Nordeste Indígena. Rio de Janeiro: Contra Capa/LACED, pp. 139–74. Grünewald, R. (ed.). 2005. Toré. Regime Encantado do Índio do Nordeste. Recife: Fundaj. Hirschkind, C. 2006. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. Keane, W. 2007. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kelly, J. 2011. State Healthcare and Yanomami Transformations: A Symmetrical Ethnography. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.

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Lévi-Strauss, C. 2007 [1955]. Tristes Trópicos. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Meyer, B. 2006. ‘Religious Sensations: Why Media, Aesthetics and Power Matter in the Study of Contemporary Religion’, Inaugural lecture, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. ———. 2009. ‘Introduction: From Imagined Communities to Aesthetic Formations: Religious Mediations, Sensational Forms, and Styles of Binding’, in B. Meyer (ed.), Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion and the Senses. New York: Palgrave, pp. 1–28. ———. 2010. ‘Aesthetics of Persuasion: Global Christianity and Pentecostalism’s Sensational Forms’, South Atlantic Quarterly 109(4): 741–63. Oliveira Filho, J. 2004. ‘Uma Etnologia dos “Índios Misturados”? Situação Colonial, Territorialização e Fluxos Culturais’, in J.P. Oliveira Filho (ed.), A Viagem da Volta: Etnicidade, Política e Reelaboração Cultural no Nordeste Indígena. Rio de Janeiro: Contra Capa/LACED, pp. 13–42. ———. 2005. ‘Prefácio’, in R. Grünewald (ed.), Toré: Regime Encantado do Índio do Nordeste. Recife: Fundaj, pp. 9–13. Pataxó. 2005. Leituras Pataxó: Raízes e Vivências do Povo Pataxó nas Escolas. Salvador: MEC/FNDE/SEC/SUDEB. Pinney, C. 2004. ‘Photos of the Gods’: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India. London: Reaktion. Ribeiro, D. 1970. Os Índios e a Civilização. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira. Sampaio, J. 2010 [1995]. ‘Sob o Signo da Cruz: Relatório Circumstanciado de Identificação e Delimitação da Terra Indígena Pataxó da Coroa Vermelha’, Cadernos do Leme 2(1): 95–176. Santos-Granero, F. 2009. ‘Hybrid Bodyscapes: A Visual History of Yanesha Patterns of Cultural Change’, Current Anthropology 50(4): 477–512. Sprejer, P. 2012. ‘Índio do BNDES’, Revista O Globo, 1 July. Taussig, M. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. ———. 2012. Beauty and the Beast. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Verrips, J. 2006. ‘Aisthesis and An-aesthesia’, Ethnologia Europea 35 (1/2): 27–33. Vilaça, A. 2000. ‘O que Significa Tornar-se Outro? Xamanismo e Contato Interétnico na Amazônia’, Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais 15(44): 56–72. ———. 2002. ‘Making Kin Out of Others in Amazonia’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI) (N.S.) 8: 347–65.

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———. 2005. ‘Chronically Unstable Bodies: Reflections on Amazonian Corporalities’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI) (N.S.) 11: 445–64. Vilaça, A. and R. Wright (ed.). 2009. Native Christians: Modes and Effects of Christianity among Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. Farnham: Ashgate. Viveiros de Castro, E. 1998. ‘Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI) (N.S.) 4(3): 469–88. ———. 1999. ‘Etnologia Brasileira’, in S. Miceli (ed.), O que ler na Ciencia Social Brasileira: Antropologia, Vol. I. Sao Paulo: Editora Sumaré/ Anpocs/CAPES, pp. 109–23. ———. 2002. A Inconstância da Alma Selvagem. São Paulo: Cosac & Naify. ———. 2004. ‘Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation’, Tipití 2(1): 3–22. ———. 2013. ‘The Relative Native’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(3): 473–502. Wagner, R. 1981. The Invention of Culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2010. ‘Post-Scriptum: O Problema da Indexação’, in R. Wagner. A Invenção da Cultura. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, pp. 367–69.

2 Intangible Heritage, Tangible Controversies

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The Baiana and the Acarajé as Boundary Objects in Contemporary Brazil

Bruno Reinhardt

Contemporary representations of religion and heritage carry interesting, if not paradoxical, resemblances. Both phenomena are considered to be ­expanding their presence and/or increasing their visibility, although the very categories they are supposed to exemplify have been put into question. Whilst there is overall consensus that ‘public religions’ (Casanova 1994) have been revitalized and the ‘heritage industry’ (Hewison 1987) has acquired a global reach, scholars have interrogated the meaningfulness of the concepts of ‘religion’ and ‘heritage’, showing their inventedness or constructedness and questioning their ultimate reality. The concrete ­ proliferation of ‘religious’ and ‘heritage’ formations despite (and maybe because of) the lack of clear-cut definitions tends to make nominalist ­positions on these categories look intellectually charming, but disconnected. Indeed, essentialist and nominalist stances on any social category share more than they think. Both ignore the fact that what-questions are inevitably bound to how-questions, since ‘we represent in order to intervene, and we intervene in the light of representations’ (Hacking 1983: 31). Ian Hacking’s perspective on representations has the virtue of being realist without being essentialist, and constructivist without being nominalist. He takes the constructedness of representations not in a theatrical or linguistic sense, but in the architectonic sense of blueprints entwined with what they are supposed to build. After all, a house is certainly as constructed as it is real. Representations can be ‘interactive kinds’, tools

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pragmatically entangled with their objects’ part of reality, rather than opposed to reality (Hacking 2000). Various scholars working on both religion and heritage have already developed an awareness regarding definitions akin to Hacking’s. According to Talal Asad (2012: 38): the reason there cannot be a universal conception of religion is not because religious phenomena are infinitely varied … Nor is it the case that there is no such thing, really, as religion. It is that defining is a historical act and when the definition is deployed, it does different things at different times and in different circumstances, and responds to different questions, needs, and pressures.

Asad approaches definitions of secularity similarly, and conceives the religious and the secular as genealogically and perfomatively bound to each other as scales of ‘authoritative discourse’, making secular and religious subjects through complementarities and frictions across different processes of secular state-formation (Asad 1993, 2003). Laurejane Smith’s (2006: 13) vocal claim that ‘there is no such thing as “heritage”’ looks nominalist at a first glance. Nevertheless, her basic point is formally closely related to Asad’s perspective on religion. Smith claims (2006: 13) that heritage is not a thing – be that ‘natural’, ‘cultural’ or ‘intangible’ – but a discursive process with material entailments: ‘the discursive construction of heritage is itself part of the cultural and social processes that are heritage’. What Smith (2006: 6) calls ‘authorized heritage discourse’ is a bureaucratic apparatus that ‘constructs a sense of what heritage is – and is not’. By so doing, it advances hegemonic notions of ‘nature’, ‘history’, and ‘culture’ through a body of experts who both point to and reshape reality through ‘metacultural artefacts’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2004), such as heritage lists, legislation and policies. Like any apparatus of hegemony, ‘authorized heritage discourse’ aims at a ‘saturation of the whole process of living’ (Williams 1977: 110) – that is, at naturalizing ideologies at a sensorial level. However, such apparatuses always remain intrinsically unfulfilled, due to internal contradictions, the disputability of hegemonic projects, and the inevitable frictions between power relations and resistance (Foucault 2000). Heritage-making projects vary in style and display diverse levels of porosity to input ‘from below’ (Schramm 2015). Indeed, the very notion of intangible heritage emerged as a response to multiculturalist pressures to decentre heritage from its Eurocentric historicity (Smith and Akagawa 2009), which does not mean that it is immune to the inextricable power-nexus between definitions and interventions (De Jong 2007). Keeping the perspectives laid out by Asad (1993, 2003) and Smith (2006) in mind, in this chapter I examine ethnographically some recent controversies about the proper/improper relations between heritage and religion in Brazil. If, according to Van de Port and Meyer (this volume), ‘fabrication does not necessarily stand in opposition to the real, but brings it about’, how

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do the processes of fabricating these social domains intersect, in practice, in terms of complementarity and dissent, of boundary-breaking and -making? Following Latour’s (2005: 25) advice, I take controversies as a socially productive phenomenon – that is, ‘not simply a nuisance to be kept at bay, but what allows the social to be established’. As such, controversies are to be traced and examined through the various actors and artefacts they assemble and the truth-effects they generate, rather than simply being ‘solved’ by scholars from a non-participatory vantage point. The controversial subject and object here at stake is the acarajé, an iconic representative of the regional cuisine and identity of the state of Bahia and the African legacy to Brazilian culture at large (Martini 2007; Bitar 2011). Traditional acarajé sellers are called baianas de acarajé, and are widely recognized in Brazil for their specific aesthetics; in particular, a mode of dress deemed as rooted in Africa as the food they trade and the culinary techniques they use. According to oral history, all these practices derive from Candomblé communities, in which Yoruba-based religious practices were transposed to Bahia during the last wave of the transatlantic slave trade. In 2005, Brazil’s National Institute of Artistic and Historical Heritage (IPHAN) designated the baiana de acarajé craft (ofício da baiana de acarajé) as intangible national heritage (see also Adinolfi in this volume). This process was certainly from below, meaning that it was the fruit of public demands stemming from Bahia’s civil society, especially from ABAM, the Baianas de Acarajé Association, with the support of scholars, Candomblé terreiros (temples), and black movement associations. Here we find religion playing another active role in constituting acarajé as heritage. The main trigger pushing these civil bodies to access the state’s will to safeguard was the changes in the craft introduced by evangelical traders from the 1990s onward (Reinhardt 2007: 96–105). Curiously, that was a time in which the figure of the baianas de acarajé had already been fully secularized, their link to Afro-Brazilian religion remaining mostly symbolic. Nevertheless, evangelical traders started to undermine this relatively stable configuration by renaming the acarajé ‘Jesus Fritters’ (Bolinho de Jesus) and refusing to wear the baiana’s traditional attire, which they associated with a religion they did not follow. Public opposition was strong, and extended to Salvador’s non-evangelical population at large, already used to seeing in the traditional baiana a cultural trademark with which they identified. Debates about the ultimate nature of the acarajé circulated through newspapers, TV, radio programmes and everyday conversation: Is the acarajé a religious object, a traditional craft or a mere commodity? By conferring upon this craft the authoritative seal of intangible heritage, the state was intervening and providing an authoritative answer, but, as we will see, it did not paralyse dissent. In what follows, my intention is to present the multiple transfigurations of the acarajé and the baiana, first diachronically, by summarizing some

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key moments of their biography (Kopytoff 1986), and then synchronically, across domains, sensibilities and religious groups. I conclude by summarizing the effects and interventions elicited by heritagization and argue that the acarajé’s social productivity is not based upon a stable definition of what it is, but precisely upon its dynamic status as a ‘boundary object’ (Star and Griesemer 1989), which circulates across evaluative stances and semiotic ideologies (Keane 2003) while helping different actors to assemble publics around specific claims.

From ‘Vile Food’ to Cultural Icon The first acknowledged historical reference to the presence of the acarajé in Salvador was provided by Luís dos Santos Vilhena, a Portuguese born in 1744, who arrived in the city in 1787 to work as a colonial bureaucrat and teacher of Greek (Bacelar 2013). According to one of his narratives, dated from the early nineteenth century: It is common to see eight, ten or more slaves coming out of the most opulent households … to sell on the streets the most vile and insignificant foods, such as mocotós, cow feet, carurus, vatapás, porridges, pamonha, canjica, that is, corn cakes, acaçá, acarajé, ubobó, coconut rice, coconut beans, angu, rice and corn sponge cakes (pão-de-lós), toasted pieces of sugar cane … and sweets of infinite varieties … (In Bacelar 2013: 301)

Vilhena’s comments testify to the impact of the transatlantic slave trade not only in Bahia’s sugar and tobacco plantations, but also in the capital’s urban life. It addresses a particular type of urban slave – escravos de ganho (‘slaves with earnings’) – who had freedom of mobility, worked in the service sector and received different percentages of profits from their masters (Oliveira 1988; Graham 2010). Most slaves working in the urban food trade were female. They transposed to Salvador their previous expertise on African food markets and acquired a structural place in Salvador’s food economy, catering especially to the popular classes. By working as traders, escravos de ganho could accumulate wealth and eventually buy their freedom. Despite official attempts to control urban trade according to racialized codes, including extra fees applied to African-born subjects, their economic activities introduced a significant dose of mobility to a social order based upon rigid race, ethnic and status markers. Graham (2010: 209) mentions the exceptional case of an African-born street vendor baptized Ana de São José de Trindade, who, after purchasing her freedom, came to own ‘a three-storey house with glass-windows and gilt-framed English paintings’, besides slaves of her own, becoming ‘noticeably wealthier than many Portuguese-born storekeepers’. Escravos de ganhos, both male and female, also converted their economic capital into political capital; for instance, through strikes against the state’s regulatory power (Reis 1993). According

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to IPHAN’s report, contemporary baianas de acarajé are ‘heirs of escravos de ganho’ (IPHAN 2007: 16). As an important transatlantic trade port, Salvador received a variety of culinary goods from Europe, Brazil’s hinterlands and Africa. Local food preferences were differentiated across race and status distinctions. However, periods of scarcity, along with the African presence inside the masters’ kitchens, curiosity and experimentalism generated changes in taste, adaptations and creolizations across time (Cascudo 2004). Vilhena’s list of foods included five dishes, which, in Brazil today, are deemed to be of African-origin or to have African influences at the level of condiments and techniques: acaçá, a dough made of white or red corn boiled in banana leaves; vatapá, a paste made of various ingredients including cornmeal, cassava, ginger, pepper, peanuts, cashew nuts, milk, onions and tomatoes; caruru, an okra-based stew; abará, a dough made of black-eyed beans (Phaseolus Angulares Wild) boiled in banana leaves; and the acarajé itself, which is the same dough but deep-fried in palm oil (azeite de dendê). The Africanness of the acarajé is indexed first and foremost by its very name, which, according to IPHAN’s heritagization report, is a composed name in disguise, merging the Yoruba term akará (fire), used to refer to the bean fritter in Africa, with ajeum, the verb to eat. ‘Acarajé!’ would be the way sellers announced the food – ‘Eat acará!’ or ‘Eat fire!’ – having become the customary name in Brazil.1 Akará is still consumed in Nigeria as well as other African countries including Sierra Leone, Ghana and Cameroon, where it is named kosai, kossé or akla. A second major sign of Africanness concerning the acarajé, which attracted much attention from IPHAN, is its contemporary presence among the various ceremonial foods related to Orisha worship in Brazil. According to IPHAN’s report: ‘The acarajé trade is part of a great market that was conceded by the Orishas to female Candomblé initiates [mulheres de santo] from Bahia’ (IPHAN 2007: 22). Food and commensality are important material media whereby humans ‘make’ and interact with gods both in traditional Yoruba religion (Barber 1981) and Candomblé (Lody 1998). The very process of cooking food offerings in a terreiro’s kitchen has a spiritual and pedagogical role. It is a moment of transmission of religious knowledge and techniques, cultivating intimacy with the Orishas, and defining the spiritual family’s (família de santo) identity. The food offered to the divinities during spirit trance ceremonies comes from the same pots as the food offered to the community and external visitors during the ajeum, a final communion meal. In sum, where African gods eat, so eat humans, and Orisha worship became a channel to the maintenance and dissemination of African culinary memory in Brazil. As a ritual food, acarajé is mainly associated with the Orisha Oyá or Iansã, but also to Xangô and Exu. It acquires ritual efficacy in ceremonies such as the Akará de Oyá and is part of various mythological narratives. The prototypical Baiana de Acarajé designated by IPHAN as intangible heritage was therefore not only an escrava de ganho. She also had a

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Figure 2.1  Acarajés offered to the Orisha Iansã during a Candomblé ceremony. Photo by Mattijs van de Port. Published with permission.

religious adhesion. She was an initiate or a ‘daughter’ of the Orisha Oyá/ Iansã, who traded acarajés in order to finance her spiritual family and as a ritual duty (obrigação) to her Orisha. 2 Although this representation is not part of historical records, due to the oral and secretive nature of these religious communities during colonial times and beyond (Parés 2013), it has been reproduced consistently among practitioners throughout the ­twentieth century, having become an established piece of oral history,  which IPHAN  authenticated. 3 Candomblé priest, Jijo, leader of the Terreiro do Bogum, in Salvador, provided me with this standard ­narrative: The acarajé is no longer what it was in the beginning of the twentieth century, especially because at that time its purpose was to support the spiritual family financially. Women went out of the terreiros walking great distances, settling their trays on the streets and selling the acarajé either to support the family or to pay some religious obligation, after they had completed their initiation cycle. Selling acarajé was a way of paying a certain duty to her saint. Those iaôs [initiates] had the religious duty to sell acarajé. That depended on her saint, on the final will of her saint, which authorized the connections between the terreiros and the commercial activities of their members. There were even woman who, after coming out of the initiation room, had to sell lard. It sounds awful, but there are some stories told by the elders that describe women, some of them recently freed slaves, who built fortunes selling lard in Salvador, with their saints’ will behind them, of course. So, it is the Orisha that oriented these women’s professional lives and protected them. The Orisha gave them a way, a path to go on, and today you don’t see this anymore.

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Jijo’s narrative highlighted the great gap separating contemporary baianas de acarajé from their ancestors, due to the secularization of the trade. This process was associated with a number of structural changes in local and national society, including major shifts in dominant conceptions of religion and heritage. First and foremost, Brazil’s political regime changed from the independent Monarchy that had ruled since 1822 to a Republic, in 1889, following the abolition of slavery in 1888. However, formal freedom and citizenship for Africans and African descendants did not mean full integration. The early Republic was based upon an evolutionist social order, oriented towards the Eurocentric telos of ‘civilization’, and new forms of eugenics and social engineering, such as ideologies of ‘whitening’ (branqueamento) (Skidmore 1974), aimed at dissipating the ‘primitive’ influence of Africans in the national culture. In Salvador, black female food traders continued to be marginalized, but now more indirectly, through sanitarismo, a biopolitical apparatus aimed at accelerating the city’s path to civilization by waging preemptive wars against diseases (Ferreira Filho 1994). Sanitarismo justified large-scale urban reforms oriented by bourgeois notions of hygiene and the separation of private and public spheres. It targeted popular markets as well as mobile or fixed food sellers with draconian laws that entailed over-taxation, the cancelation of work permits and the relocation of these populations to the city’s outskirts. A similar dual process of assimilation and marginalization affected Candomblé communities after the institution of the Republic. Whilst the new Constitution disestablished the Catholic Church from the status of official religion of Brazil, secularized the state and granted fullfledged freedom of worship, the self-regulation of religious bodies was predicated on notions of ‘public order’ and ‘morality’ that raised Catholic Christianity to a prototype of ‘religion’ as such (Giumbelli 2008). Laws against ‘magic’ and ‘witch doctoring’ (curandeirismo) and even littering (in the case of food offerings left on the streets or at crossroads) were used to keep Candomblé terreiros under constant police surveillance and repression (Lühning 1996). Both popular food traders and Candomblé communities remained resilient despite state repression, however. In a report from 11 June 1916, the local newspaper A Tarde testified to how the fame of a popular street cook named Benta had overcome official attempts to isolate her business from the city centre: They can move Benta’s food board [tabuleiro] to behind Mercado Modelo, to Praça do Peixe, to Manoel Vitorino street [all peripheral sites at that time], if they want. Clients will continue to flock after her delicious caruru, her ­incomparable efó, her tasty acarajés, her famous vatapá and soft abará. How many people would learn to swim if Benta’s joint were moved to Forte do Mar [a maritime colonial fortification] only to avoid being deprived of her food.

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The journalist highlighted how Benta’s clientele included a group of ‘secretive consumers, people of high status and noble descent, raised by black nurses who mastered the secrets of those delicacies’ (in Ferreira Filho 1994: 113–14). Similarly, Candomblé terreiros continued to organize religious activities through strategies of secrecy and masquerading as well patrimonial alliances with elites, such as the habit of exchanging spiritual services for protection by appointing intellectuals, bureaucrats, police officers and politicians to ceremonial offices, such as ogã. In 1934, Brazilian medical doctor and social psychologist Arthur Ramos noticed how ‘the ogã is almost always a white person, respected by the black members as a protector of the terreiro’ (Ramos 1988: 51). This period of resistance amidst official marginalization eroded slowly but steadily from the 1940s onwards, with the emergence of a new ‘idea of Bahia’ (Pinho 1998), which redefined the local culture as a melting pot and emphasized ‘African’ influences at the levels of food, music, spirituality and aesthetics. This process was coeval with a nationwide shift in the notion of Brazilianness from eugenic and evolutionary models concerned with catching up with European civilization towards a focus on cultural autochthony, based upon the ideology of mestiçagem. At its heart was Gilberto Freyre’s (1956 [1933]) thesis defining Brazil as a ‘Lusotropical civilization’ gestated by a creative mix of Indigenous, African and European elements. Freyre’s celebration of hybridity and focus on Brazil’s cultural singularity and identity despite class, racial, ethnic and regional distinctions was instrumentalized by the nationalist apparatus of the Estado Novo (Darylle 2001), becoming overwhelmingly dominant until recently. Pinho (1998) highlights how the idea of Bahia was part of a new local hegemony concerned with producing cultural consensus amidst socio-economic and racial inequalities, but also an effect of Bahia’s economic marginalization during the twentieth century, which led to the strategic prioritization of the tourism industry, especially since the 1960s. Once  ­associated with primitivism, witchcraft and charlatanism, Candomblé terreiros started in the 1940s a slow transfiguration into what Van de Port (2011: 100) has called ‘a symbol bank’ to the local representational economy, from which musicians, novelists, poets, artists, movie makers, politicians, tourism agents and, more recently, environmentalists, black, gay and feminist activists have drawn resources to advance specific ­versions – hegemonic and counter-cultural – of Bahian culture. The same structural process affected the figure of the baiana de acarajé. Previously seen by the state as a dirty, masculinized and noisy troublemaker, transgressing civilized boundaries between privacy and publicity by setting her kitchen on the streets, the baiana has become an iconic representative of Bahia’s hospitality and a constant presence in the advertisements promoted by the state’s tourism agency BAHIATURSA. Poets and novelists, most notably Jorge Amado, have celebrated these traders as living cultural archives, sources of popular wisdom and as graceful and seductive figures.

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Following this Romantic trend, anthropologist Pierre Verger argues that ‘what determines the elegant posture of black women in Bahia is their habit of carrying on their heads a variety of loads, from clothes to baskets and food trays decorated with lace, upon which they display and sell their foods on the street corners’ (Verger 1992: 105). Musician Dorival Caymmi composed two famous songs about baianas de acarajé in the late 1930s. O Que é Que a Baiana Tem? describes in detail the beauty of a baiana’s clothes and ornaments and her flirtatious walking style, whilst A Preta do Acarajé reproduces an acarajé trader’s work song, based upon Caymmi’s childhood memories. Both were recorded by Luso-Brazilian samba singer and actress Carmen Miranda, who incorporated the figure of the seductive baiana in her own style of dress and performances in Brazil and abroad, including Hollywood movies. Miranda’s estheticized baiana shared a number of traits with mimetic representations of this figure appearing during Rio de Janeiro’s carnival parades during the same period (Barsante 1985).4 From the 1970s onwards, the acarajé became fully established as one of the most typical examples of ‘Bahian cuisine’ (comida baiana). Various baianas gained a canonical status in Salvador’s popular culture, including Romélia, Vitorina, Damásia and Quitéria, all of whom worked in Salvador’s Historic Center, and a younger generation including Dinha, Chica and Cira, whose trading points followed the city’s expansion towards the northern coastal areas. In the first systematic academic study of this professional group, Machado Neto and Braga (1977) acknowledge the complete separation of the acarajé craft from the regulatory influence of Candomblé terreiros. They also warned that famous and affluent baianas were a small minority within a population of thousands of sellers, most of them with little formal education and low incomes. The acarajé’s very materiality has changed alongside its increasing popularization. According to Manuel Querino’s 1928 (Querino 2011) ethnographic description of the recipe and cooking techniques, the beans were processed on a grinding stone. The dough was then slowly manually blended with the aid of a large wooden spoon and mixed with garlic and salt. The spoon was used to give a round shape to the small chunks of dough that were deep-fried in palm oil. The fritter was then covered with ‘Nagô sauce’, made of red peppers, onions and shrimps ground using the same technique. In order to save time and effort, contemporary acarajé dough is prepared in electric blenders. Baianas often use ready-made acarajé dough marketed at Feira de São Joaquim, a popular market. The bean fritter is no longer eaten whole, but, like a sandwich, cut in half and filled with various supplements – vatapá, caruru, vinaigrette, pepper sauce and dried shrimps – according to the customer’s taste. The acarajé is consumed in Salvador today by tourists and locals, and across class distinctions. It is also sold in restaurants, where it is often eaten with cutlery. It can be found all across Brazil, sold either by traditionally dressed baianas working outside Bahia, or in restaurants specialized in

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Bahian cuisine. Increasing commodification also gave rise to innovations, such as powdered acarajé, an industrialized version to be prepared at home, sold mostly in the supermarkets of Brazil’s Southern regions, and alternative recipes in which beans are replaced by lentils and chickpeas (Borges 2008). Even the once sharp gender line lending singularity to the traditional trade has been blurred, as testified by the recent popularity of male baianos. Since the 1940s, then, the biographies of both the acarajé and the baiana have been characterized by an ambiguous mix of what Kopytoff (1986) calls cultural singularization, indexed by their greater public appreciation as symbols of ‘Bahian identity’, and commodification, which submitted the craft to impersonal market principals, including (in the cases of powdered acarajé or acarajé served in restaurants) the alienation of the product from its traditional producer. These simultaneous processes incited anxieties about cultural purity or pollution. As early as in the 1960s, city chronicler Hildegardes Vianna depicted the ‘modern’ way of eating acarajé in Salvador, with various sauces and fillings, as ‘a proof of our culinary tradition’s degeneration’ (Vianna 1977 [1963]: 38). Nevertheless, it was only in the 1990s that public tolerance of innovations reached a saturation point. That was the moment in which evangelical baianas introduced changes in this craft that seemed to have transgressed once and for all a tacit threshold of authenticity, bringing the issue into intense public debate and paving the way for state intervention.

From ‘Jesus Fritter’ to Intangible Heritage The growth of evangelical Christianity in Brazil, especially since the 1990s, represents the establishment, on a large scale, of a new kind of religious subject in the country. Less pluralistic, syncretic and experimentalist, evangelicals pursue a unitary life oriented towards an ethics of conviction and a unequivocal approach to religious difference. By demarcating their faith normatively as the only path to truth, evangelicals have provoked a widespread sense of disarray in the country about the boundaries separating religion from other spheres of social life. Evangelicals want to be evangelicals not only in church or at home, but also at work, at school, with friends, during moments of entertainment, while occupying political offices, doing business and engaging with popular culture and heritage, which necessarily raises questions about how these supposedly autonomous domains of existence should interrelate. This is especially the case among so-called Neo-Pentecostal or third wave Pentecostal churches (Freston 1999), which ally such a holistic life project with a modernist ethos that embraces mass media and the market as legitimate means for broadcasting, repacking and disseminating Christianity in the public sphere. In Salvador’s case, evangelicals have systematically resisted the ­hegemonic idea of Bahia established since the 1940s, which they consider

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unrepresentative of their way of living and, indeed, averse to it. The result has been a ‘culture war’ waged by converts, ministers and politicians operating at two interconnected levels. First, they have attempted to Christianize Salvador’s popular culture by producing evangelical versions of a number of phenomena deemed typically Bahian, such as Salvador’s street carnival, the Afro-Brazilian musical genre Axé and the Afro-Brazilian martial art Capoeira. Their aim is not to reject these practices, but to cleanse them from what they deem sinful influences, hence capitalizing on their pubic vitality in order to make evangelical Christianity more attractive, especially to youth. In so doing they have encouraged a religiously circumscribed market niche for the production, transmission and circulation of cultural products, a form of Christian branding. The emergence of evangelical baianas selling ‘Jesus Fritters’ in Salvador’s peripheral areas during the 1990s was one aspect of this general trend. Second, evangelical culture wars in Brazil have often transcended issues of morality and assumed a more spiritualized version, becoming a case of ‘spiritual warfare’ against demonic agents. Evangelicals’ demonizing disposition has especially targeted Afro-Brazilian religions, a phenomenon that, in Salvador’s case, has included the multitude of public symbols of ‘Bahianess’ drawn from this tradition and spread throughout the cityscape, such as statues, murals and museums (Reinhardt 2007; Sansi 2007). In consonance, evangelical baianas not only changed their products’ name to demarcate their religious affiliation, but also advertised them as ‘made without sorcery’ and ‘protected by the Holy Spirit’, capitalizing on popular rumours about spells and substances used by traditional baianas to increase their sales. In so doing, they openly re-enchanted a trade that had been secularized, a position legitimized by influential NeoPentecostal pastors, such as Bishop Edir Macedo, founder of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, who claimed in one of his polemic bestsellers from the 1990s that: ‘Anyone who feeds from the dishes sold by the famous baianas are subject to, sooner or later, suffer from their stomachs. Almost all baianas are Candomblé initiates or priests, and put spells on these delicacies in order to achieve good business’ (Macedo 2005: 42). Macedo’s inaccurate claim that all baianas are affiliated to Candomblé testifies to his denomination’s proselytistic strategy of re-enchanting Brazilian popular culture negatively in order to necessitate its own spiritual services of ritual cleansing and protection. Such a strategic mix of ritual appropriation and repudiation has been central to the Universal Church’s popular appeal, leading anthropologist Ari Oro to define this denomination as a ‘religious-phagic’ church, which thrives by ‘eating’ the beliefs and agents of other religious segments and ‘digesting’ them according to its own doctrines (2007: 37). Macedo is keen to reassert the religious link between Candomblé and the acarajé because such anachronism allows him to make it the object of spiritual warfare and to claim this cultural territory for

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Jesus. Such icono-phagic procedure was reproduced on the ground by some evangelical baianas. Evangelical innovations on the acarajé trade had a central place in IPHAN’s designation report, and were among the justifications evoked to safeguard this phenomenon in 2005. Heritagization (see above) was, however, the later outcome of a longer process in which the problems of recognizing what is an ‘authentic’ baiana de acarajé and how this activity should be regulated always walked hand in hand. An important predecessor was a municipal ordinance enacted by Salvador city council in November 1998 (Ordinance 12.175) with the aim of standardizing the acarajé craft and trade. It addressed the content of the baianas’ trays, the hygiene of production and commercialization, fees and the location of trade points, as well as sellers’ self-presentation. Asserting that the product’s official name must be respected, it prescribed that baianas must wear ‘typical clothes, in accordance with Afro-Brazilian tradition’ (art. 2, par. 2) – that is: ‘bata ojá, em algodão bico de renda, saia rodada, torno pano-da-costa, colares de contas e argolas de búzios’ (ojá smock, made of cotton lace, flared skirt, a traditional Afro-Brazilian knit cloak called pano da costa, bead necklaces and cowry bracelets). Breaches of sartorial rules were sanctioned through a fine of 300 Brazilian reais (around 100 dollars). Mayor Antônio Imbassahy was clear during his press releases at that time that one of the main reasons justifying state intervention had been undue interference of religious groups in Salvador’s popular culture and

Figure 2.2  Baianas de acarajé attending a meeting organized by Brazil’s Heritage Agency, IPHAN. Photo by Mattijs van de Port. Published with permission.

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traditions. The city administration’s conservative response to evangelical innovations signalled that this craft already had a heritage value that preceded its official recognition by IPHAN. The encompassing idea ­ of  Bahia to which the baiana de acarajé came to be assimilated over the  years is, after all, not simply a disembedded construct. It incites ­material attachments, sentiments of belonging, and justifies decisions and interventions. The iconic connection between these popular traders and Bahian identity has led most of Salvador’s public sphere to coalesce around the opinion that evangelical innovations in this field were illegitimate and inauthentic appropriations of a public good, justifying attempts to safeguard its replication. Such an informal heritage aura was open-ended enough to allow the articulation of a number of different interest groups around the project of reclaiming from IPHAN an official heritage seal for this craft. Whereas the local state was interested in protecting Bahian identity from what they deemed inauthentic replicas, the Association of Baianas de Acarajés (ABAM, founded in 1992) was seeking to domesticate a highly competitive trade threatened by an anomic, free-for-all process of modernization. Here, it is important to acknowledge that the heritage field itself had changed in Brazil, especially since the country’s redemocratization in 1988. The possibility of reclaiming heritage status from the state has become a matter of citizenship for a number of disenfranchised groups and traditional communities. The mestiçagem paradigm and its corresponding ‘racial democracy’ discourse have been challenged and criticized by growing popular demands for multiculturalist inclusion and a state apparatus more responsive to questions of racism and reparation (Htun 2004). These new forms of cultural politics preceded IPHAN’s incorporation of the notion of ‘intangible heritage’ in 2003, and found in it another route through which to access rights and recognition from the state. In this sense, by reclaiming heritage status, ABAM was actively mobilizing their place in the idea of Bahia, in order to transform it from within and gain political and economic leverage, rather than simply being constrained or manipulated by these power relations. The heritage and religious fields have also intersected differently in contemporary Brazil. The quest for heritage status has been an important means for Candomblé communities to seek legitimacy and pluralize the once hegemonic and generalist association between Catholicism and Brazilian culture (Giumbelli 2014). According to Chuva, ‘from IPHAN’s creation in 1937 until 1946, over 50% of all landmarks registered were Catholic churches’ (Chuva 2009: 128 in Giumbelli 2014: 446). The Catholic monopoly over religious heritage in Brazil started to be broken in 1984, with IPHAN’s pioneer decision to designate the terreiro Casa Branca do Engenho Velho a cultural heritage of Brazil. Since then, a number of other Candomblé temples in Bahia have followed this path (Adinolfi and Van de Port 2013, Adinolfi this volume).

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Candomblé communities worked hand in hand with ABAM, sectors of the black movement and academics in order to seek the heritagization of the baiana de acarajé craft as a form of state recognition of their historical contributions to Bahian and Brazilian culture at large. These groups coalesced around a representation of the baiana as a symbol of Candomblé-based black female resistance and entrepreneurship, quite far from the seductive popular trader reproduced by the conventional idea of Bahia. Last, but not least, considering the nationwide escalation of tensions between evangelicals and Afro-Brazilian religious, the heritagization of the baiana de acarajé craft was seen by these groups as a reparation measure against what they considered evangelicals’ intolerance and racism, their own way of responding proactively to the ‘holy war’ incited by some of these churches. Corroborating these expectations, the anthropologists responsible for IPHAN’s designation report recognized that the baiana and the acarajé  have been ‘subjected to various processes of appropriating and re-signification by different sectors of society’ (IPHAN 2007: 18), which did not prevent them from extracting from this dynamic phenomenon its heritage aura, or its ‘link to a cultural universe that is both specific and fundamental to the formation of the Brazilian identity’. Heritage value was inferred from the craft’s history but also ‘from below’, according to oral histories, everyday practices and ‘the meaning attributed by traditional sellers’, registered through ethnographic fieldwork. The acarajé’s ‘sacred origins’ were traced by the report into the present either loosely, by defining it as a ‘comida de santo e de gente’ (22) (a food of Orishas and humans) or more systematically, as in the following description of the ‘ritual’ baianas perform while preparing their trade point and the selling tray (tabuleiro): The preparation ritual is characterized first by cleaning the trade point, which is mopped and washed with water and lavender; next, the tray is decorated with garlic, leaves, toasted sugar with parsley, and covered with cartridge paper. Upon the cartridge paper, they set coins and a pot with water, rue, guiné, pinhão roxo, figas (amulet), and beads of Ogum, Exu, Oxum, Iemanjá and Oxalá (Orishas); later, discreetly, they incense the environment. It is part of the ritual to place over the tray images of Saint Anthony or Saint Onofre and to offer seven acarajés to the Ibejis (twin spirits), represented by seven children who pass by the place. (IPHAN 2007: 23–24)

The scene is certainly a narrative construction, which asserts its object’s heritage aura by imbuing it with the existential and symbolic depth and thickness typical of ‘religion’. The ordinary act of mopping the trade point is portrayed as a cleansing ritual. The tray is transfigured into a syncretic shrine composed of sacred leaves, beads and statues, and a sacrificial offering opens the seller’s workday. As a construction, this description is not simply alien from reality. It is an anthropological montage that lends

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textual systematicity to practices that are otherwise much more contingent and fragmentary. During my fieldwork observations in Salvador, 5 I did testify to many of the habits described above in isolation or in different arrangements, but never with such coherence.6 The very ‘religiosity’ of these practices seemed rather inchoate. Most Catholic baianas who I have met and who did offer seven acarajés to children as an opening workday ritual justified it as an ‘acarajé tradition’, devoid of spiritual entailments. The shrine-like tray, when actually existing, was justified by various baianas only on aesthetic terms, as a decoration rendering their work environment more pleasant. It is certainly also a form of attending to tourists’ desire for an authentic ‘Bahian experience’, a taste of Africa in Brazil with both visual and g­ ustative dimensions. Although intrinsic to the baiana de acarajé as an aesthetic formation (Meyer 2009), propensity to feel such heritage effects are clearly predicated on the consumer’s degree of proximity to such phenomenon, and the experience of eating acarajé can be highly routinized as a simple ‘meal’ for most of Salvador’s native population. To Evangelical baianas, however, even those who do wear traditional attire and use the foods’ traditional name, the ‘ritual’ described by IPHAN above is completely alien. Heritagization is governed by a logic of canonization by typification, which inevitably produces zones of exclusion. A basic component of its politics of authentication (see Van de Port and Meyer, this volume) is the active work performed by heritage experts, such as anthropologists, and metacultural artefacts, such as heritagization reports and legislation, in establishing what is essential and supplementary to a tradition by selectively surveying empirical tokens.7 What is particularly interesting about this case is how, by making authoritative claims, defining a baiana de acarajé and trying to negate dissent, IPHAN found itself making normative claims (even if deliberately ambiguous ones) about the religiosity or spirituality of these subjects. In the next section, I shift from a historical to an ethnographic stance and contrast such official discourses with differing opinions about this craft and its heritage/religious values emerging among evangelicals and Candomblé leaders, as well as baianas from both camps.

The Controversy Across Religious Groups and Domains Given its strong focus on proselytism, evangelical Christianity tends to thrive publically by eliciting controversies. I suggest, however, that the protocols whereby this generally counter-cultural voice has been articulated in Salvador’s public sphere have changed over time and become more in tune with liberal and multiculturalist grammars of difference. For example, this is the blunt voice used by an evangelical minister to problematize the idea of Bahia in a letter to the editor of A Tarde, in 1989.

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Mr Editor. What a rare opportunity to show bravery! That’s the perfect scene for evangelical politicians to show their purpose. Now, with the Holy War declared, this bellicose urge for the extermination of Orishas, Caboclos and Guias [Afro-Brazilian religious entities], evangelicals will finally be able to enlarge the city’s horizons, and the city councilor Alvaro Martins will be able to care for Bahia’s Christian family, constraining the evil influence of pais and maes-desanto [Candomblé’s male and female priests] and preventing this exaggerated Africanism that only disseminates the devil’s cult. Maybe that’s the moment of erasing from Bahia’s map and history, this ode to sin, protected by the confusion between religious tolerance and lack of discernment … Evangelicals are citizens who pay their taxes. They have the right to claim that the state should not privilege, under the guise of ‘culture’, situations that diminish Christian dignity, for instance: spending public resources in Bartolomeu Natural Park, because we all know this place is destined to be a dwelling for ebos [offerings], fruits of sorcery. Also, keeping in the City’s Museum an idolatrous collection of Orisha items, as if all of Salvador’s inhabitants professed this Satanism. It is a duty of evangelical politicians, whose mission is to defend our community, to represent our interests of salvation and correction of humanity.

This letter was written at a time in which evangelicals represented around 10 per cent of the city’s population (1990 census) and had started entering the political scene systematically. The minister’s rhetorical style is openly agonistic, and has no concern in dissociating religious from political justifications. Comments about exterminating demons go hand in hand with claims for minority rights, citizenship and representativity. Racist and generalizing references to the city’s ‘exaggerated Africanism’ were unconcealed, and the notion of ‘Bahian culture’ was ultimately taken as a form of state-supported Satanism in disguise. This was, in sum, the voice of an angry dissident minority enacted without much public decorum. What I encountered among evangelical leaders (first in 2005 and then in 2014 and 2015) while debating the baiana de acarajé issue was more complex voices, increasingly aware of the protocols of secular publicity. Evangelicals have grown to represent around 25 per cent of the city’s population (2010 census), and have become a well-established interest group participating in municipal, state and federal politics. Cases of evangelical intolerance of Afro-Brazilian religions in Salvador have become highly publicized since the 1990s through the media and legal disputes, resulting in evangelicals being widely labelled as intolerant (Reinhardt 2007). A major newspaper like A Tarde would hardly publish such content today, even as a letter to the editor, for fear of eliciting social conflict. The contemporary public voices of evangelicals have themselves changed and became more sensitive to ‘impression management’ (Goffman 1974). Demons are still real and effective, but demon-talk is avoided when they engage in public inter-religious debates. As a result, complaints about state regulations concerning the baiana de acarajé were articulated during my interviews mostly in terms of juridical notions like ‘religious freedom’. That is how the leader of MONEBA, a black ­evangelical association, stated his opinion on this issue in 2005:

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Concerning the polemics around the baiana de acarajé, we believe that the rules about clothing, as they are settled by this municipal law, are enforcing on us the celebration of a religion … If, in order to sell a certain product, you have to embrace a particular religion, this is contrary to sense. We are in a free country, secular [laico], and if someone wishes to work in a certain commercial activity, she is allowed to do it regardless of the religion she professes! This law is a violence against evangelicals. The act of wearing these clothes is explicitly taken by the babalorixás and ialorixás as an inherent part of Candomblé’s cult. We do not praise the entities of Candomblé and we should have freedom to practice any religion we wish. If someone wishes to have her commercial activities within the law, she should not be obliged to worship any entity she is not willing to.

The Assemblies of God minister was well informed. He had read and even referred to IPHAN’s report during our conversation, using its ambiguous statements about the acarajé’s uninterrupted ‘sacred origins’ to corroborate his point that the traditional baiana attire was ultimately ‘religious’. If that is the case, evangelical sellers, as good citizens who paid their dues to the state, should be able to refrain from wearing them, if they wish. He defended a definition of the acarajé as a plain commodity, overlapping freedom of religion and free market initiative. In order to support this point, the minister built a curious, albeit shaky, analogy with a sartorial marker of evangelicalism: the suit and tie. For instance, male evangelicals are always wearing suit and tie. Maybe, on Sunday, they are the only ones you’ll see around here wearing suit and tie. Now, the city passes a law saying that in order to sew and sell suits and ties you have to be evangelical. We can’t do this, because every person is endowed with the freedom to make whatever they want and to buy from whoever is selling it. We have to allow those who are not willing to wear a certain symbol to choose not to use it. What this legislation is ultimately stating is that if you choose selling acarajé as a way of living, you have to follow Candomblé.

His analogy is shaky because it ignores a fundamental distinction governing the public recognition of evangelical and Candomblé material cultures. Unlike evangelical Christianity, Candomblé is considered an ‘ethnic religion’, associated with African and Afro-Brazilian culture and history. Although this division is problematic, as it implies that evangelical Christianity is universal and non-situated, whereas Candomblé is provincial and localized, it still confers to Candomblé-related material culture greater capacity to circulate far beyond the terreiros while retaining a genetic link with religion.8 Suits and ties have no historical link to evangelicals in Bahia, and evangelicals have no established material connections to Brazilian or Bahian heritage, so the supposed ‘religiosity’ of these clothes remains entirely contextual, predicated on evangelicals’ actual use of them as an index of holiness. Alternatively, Candomblé-based material culture carries the double attribute of religious and ethnic, which endows Candomblé communities with a strategic double voice. They can either claim religious ownership

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over it or waive ownership while stressing its cultural status. The ialorixá Vânia, who leads a terreiro in the neighbourhood of Pau Miúdo, embraced the first stance when she claimed that: These evangelicals should not be messing with the acarajé. This is not theirs. The acarajé is from our African origins. It is the akará, Orishas’ food. And they were calling it ‘Jesus Fritter’ … Ah … leave me alone … The first seven acarajés are offered, as I say, to the one who gives us the direction, the one who enables any communication: Exú. In any ceremony we organize, the first offerings always go to Exú. He is the first of the Orishas, who opens the way. He connects us with other divinities. After exchanging with Exú, the ceremony will definitely unfold in peace, the workday will be good, the sales will be good and nothing bad is going to happen, because we praised him first. They have to respect the axé in the acarajé.

By attributing to the acarajé an intrinsic, essential and trans-contextual religiosity, Vânia was defending, in a provocative tone, a market reserve for Candomblé followers. As I show elsewhere in more detail (Reinhardt 2007: 111–93), this argument often returns to the notion of axé, the spiritual life force that animates Candomblé material culture (Hoolbraad 2006) in order to reclaim due respect for the various Orisha statues, paintings and monuments distributed around Salvador’s cityscape. Following this reasoning, Vânia argued that, as an axé dweller, the acarajé would be entirely alien to evangelicals. Contrarily, the leader of Terreiro do Bogum, Everaldo Duarte preferred to highlight the acarajé’s ethnic status: We believe that the acarajé’s market should be open to everyone. Candomblé gave up controlling this trade long ago. We have our own way of dealing with it inside the terreiro. So, everyone is able to market this food. What you cannot have are privileges of any kind. If evangelicals want to sell acarajé and the city administration says that she has to be dressed as a baiana, so she must do it, that’s a law whose aim is to preserve a piece of heritage, the city’s culture. It has nothing to do with religion. So, we do not defend any market reserve. You might be spiritualist, evangelical, be a member or not of Candomblé, the acarajé is a commodity and it might be explored by anyone, but it must be done accordingly.

By asserting that the axé-filled acarajé produced and used within the terreiro is qualitatively different from the axé-less one marketed on the streets, Duarte rejected the latter’s religious value while retaining its ethnic value. The same argument applies to baiana attire, which mimics loosely the religious attire of Candomblé initiates, but only in ethnic terms, rendering evangelical claims about ‘religious freedom’ entirely misplaced. As a reflex, his evocation of market principles was slightly different from that of the evangelical leader. Duarte defined the acarajé sold by baianas as an ethnic commodity whose production and sale is open to anyone willing to respect the normative boundaries safeguarding its cultural authenticity,

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which were defined, after all, not by terreiros, but by the city administration and IPHAN. He corroborated the city’s legislation by defending a procedural market reserve, based not on who can sell it but on how one should sell it as a baiana – that is, as heritage. If evangelicals cannot accept such non-religious regulations, they cannot trade the product. This is, of course, not the case when the acarajé is sold as a dish at restaurants or in industrialized forms at supermarkets, where it circulates as a plain commodity. By designating the baiana de acarajé craft, not the acarajé itself, as intangible heritage, IPHAN reiterated this semiotic operation: the authoritative extraction of ethnic value from a tradition’s past religiosity, a sort of ethnic branding (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009) that counter-effectuates evangelicals’ religious branding. None of the positions discussed above stemmed from actual baianas. Those were religious leaders acting as spokespersons for these traders in order to advance broader questions concerning the relations between religion and heritage in the local public sphere. But how did those more directly impacted by this craft’s heritagization engage with the various regimes of value intersecting in it? The first point to highlight is that evangelical baianas are not a minority that can be easily ignored. Among the twenty-five baianas I interviewed during different periods of fieldwork, ten were Catholics, eight were evangelicals, two were Candomblé followers and five were non-religious. Santos’ (2013: 127–31) broader quantitative survey covered 170 baianas in 2007, and found, among this group, fortyseven Catholics, forty evangelicals, thirty Candomblé initiates and two spiritualists (espíritas). Forty-four sellers declared they had no religion ­adhesion and seven opted not to answer this question. Besides showing that religion may have a very reduced role in this trade on the ground, these numbers also testify that evangelical baianas cannot be regarded only as a threat to heritage, as implied by IPHAN’s report, having themselves become an established subgroup responsible for its social reproduction. Indeed, despite ongoing complaints by evangelical ministers and politicians, the legislation concerning traditional attire has been observed and normalized by most evangelical baianas I have met. Among the eight evangelical baianas I interviewed, only one, working in Caminho de Areia, still challenged the city’s legislation and refused to wear the traditional attire, preferring to wear a coif, rather than an African turban, and an apron, instead of the traditional skirt and blouse, a self-representation that emphasized hygiene rather than tradition. She never suffered any sanction by the city administration, testifying to its limited regulatory power. Indeed, when we talk about ‘hegemony’ or clear-cut definitions and regulations in Brazil, we should be aware of the persistent grey zone separating official stances from the ways things actually unfold and relate in the everyday (Schwarz 1992). This is also the case when it comes to examining the practical entanglements between religion and heritage ­ among baianas, as illustrated by the cases of Rita and Eliene.

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Rita has been the president of ABAM, the association of baianas de acarajé, since 2009. Her tenure was responsible for a visible increase in the organization’s representativity and visibility. Under Rita’s leadership, ABAM has expanded to thousands of members, who pay a monthly fee of eight reais (three dollars). It has opened chapters in eight Bahian towns and five capitals nationwide, and mobilized baianas publically more often in order to convert their intangible heritage status into political capital. Rita is also part of Salvador’s Black Community Council, a representative on Bahia’s Secretariat of Reparation, and a member of IPHAN’s Managing Council for the Safeguard of the Baiana de Acarajé Craft. She coordinates these voluntary political offices with a trade point at Salvador’s Historic Center, itself a UNESCO world heritage site (Collins 2015). Rita holds the office of ekedi at a Candomblé terreiro in Camaçari and her archetypal representation of the baiana de acarajé resonates closely with IPHAN’s: a descendent from female escravos de ganho and a living representative of Candomblé-originated cultural heritage. According to Rita, ‘if you’re from a terreiro, the acarajé is like a Holy Host’ – that is, it is imbued with axé. She makes sure to open her workday by offering seven acarajés to Exú, and all her employees are Candomblé members. Under Rita’s leadership, and with the aid of an endowment from IPHAN, ABAM started offering workshops to baianas across the state, where they are taught basic regulations on hygiene and food management, but also the history of their craft from Africa to Brazil. ABAM often invites historians and even Yoruba teachers to assist in their pedagogy of intangible heritage. Members are taught how to weave and knit their own baiana dresses and make their own bead necklaces and other adornments. The general purpose of ABAM’s workshops, according to Rita, is to ‘rescue our African ancestry, the baiana who bought her freedom by selling acarajé, a political woman. The woman who makes her own clothes; who cares for her tradition. We got used to the idea that we are simply traders or folkloric figures in a postcard, always ready for tourists to take pictures. This must change’. Such political acumen has already bore fruits for ABAM, as exemplified by their successful fight against FIFA’s draconian laws regulating food trade around Brazilian football stadiums during the 2014 World Cup. Aware that McDonald’s would have the monopoly over food sales inside and around Fonte Nova stadium during the Salvador matches, Rita mobilized hundreds of baianas at demonstrations. They came fully dressed, carrying wooden spoons, displaying heritage as a weapon of social mobilization. Rita also lobbied politicians at local and national levels and baianas were finally exempted from this regulation. This led her to become known in the public sphere as the ‘baiana de acarajé who beat FIFA’.9 Rita does not hide her opinion that evangelical baianas constitute an irritant to the tradition ABAM represents. Referring to ABAM’s power to confer registrations, she argued that they cannot avoid accepting evangelical members already registered, if they follow the rules, but they can make

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it harder for new ones to receive their work permit. Salvador’s city council has recently reinstated and updated the 1998 regulations concerning the baiana de acarajé trade (Ordinance 26.804, from 2015). During the ceremony that publicized the new ordinance, Rita gave an interview celebrating it as ‘clearing the mess created by people selling acarajés. I don’t say baianas, but people. Because if you’re truly a baiana de acarajé, you dress as such. This should be obvious. Otherwise you can sell sonho, coxinha, empada [Brazilian pastries]’. Rita underlined how, according to the new regulations, applicants to the title of baiana de acarajé will be ‘filtered’ by the Black Community Council, an organ dominated by Candomblé-based civil leadership, before being allowed to receive their registration from ABAM. Articulating, maybe too closely, blackness and Afro-Brazilian religiosity and rendering explicit that the ‘people’ causing havoc in this tradition were primarily evangelicals, Rita reminded the audience that ‘we must know that this is a craft performed predominantly by black women. There is no acarajé in the Bible’. ABAM’s project of rescuing the original essence of the baiana de acarajé by cleansing it from evangelical influences is a work in progress, but the capacity of these regulations to shift the profession from a procedural to a religious market reserve remains to be seen. I find such a shift unlikely. I am interested, nevertheless, in contrasting Rita’s essentialist definition of the baiana (ironically, as anachronic as that of Bishop Edir Macedo) with the improvisational character of Brazilian sociality I mentioned above, which constantly challenges sharp definitions by dwelling it their interstices. The first point of contrast I would like to call attention to is Rita’s own life course. She is widely recognized as an authentic baiana, but she does not exactly fit into her own representations of this subject. Rita was actually born in Rio de Janeiro and moved to Salvador thirty years ago, when her husband, an aeronautics lieutenant, was transferred to the city. Today Rita considers herself ‘more Bahian than Carioca [those born in Rio]’ nevertheless. Rita has no deep biographical connection with the acarajé craft either. She has a degree in accounting and worked in a public bank in Rio for many years. After she moved to Salvador, Rita worked for an electric appliance company, and entered the baiana de acarajé trade and politics relatively recently, around fifteen years ago, when she was invited by a friend to a samba de roda, a samba party, organized by ABAM at Campo Grande square. Rita had a joyful evening, and was immediately attracted by the ethnic mystique and aesthetics of the baianas. The following Sunday, she was again at the samba meeting, now fully dressed as a baiana. In sum, Rita dressed like a baiana before becoming one. After socializing and being embraced by this group, she decided to offer her voluntary services to their association. Her ethnic, esthetics and civil sympathies led to religious attachments, and Rita eventually became a Candomblé initiate. After a few years of working for ABAM, Rita completed her transfiguration by enrolling in a cooking course offered by

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SENAC10 to ABAM members, learned how to cook the bean fritter and opened her own acarajé stall. My point is not to question Rita’s authenticity, as if there were a single and stable evaluative standard for that, but to highlight how her rapid transformation from a complete outsider into an iconic representative of this tradition required an overlapping of constructedness and visceral conviction that may find no room in the nostalgic protocols of her own definition of a baiana de acarajé. Indeed, Rita’s very anti-evangelical rhetoric is also more flexible in practice. After I asked her if there were any evangelical baiana working at the Historic Center I could talk to, she introduced me to Eliene, who, to my surprise, turned out to be one of her closest friends and collaborators. Eliene has been a baiana for thirty years now and is a member of ABAM’s board of directors, sharing the battlefield with Rita. Like Rita, she did not inherit this craft from her mother, who was indeed a street-food seller but who worked with fruits and grilled corn. For economic reasons, Eliene had to abandon school at fifth grade and started working as a maid and a nanny at the age of ten. She started selling acarajés at fourteen, during festas de largo, neighbourhood parties. The way Eliene entered this trade is also quite telling. She was literally a facade baiana. She faked heritage as a strategy of survival. Eliene’s brother, who was a Candomblé priest and learned how to cook acarajés amidst the Candomblé community, was actually the one who decided to embrace this trade. However, as a male baiano de acarajé, he could not get a work permit. FENACAB, the Federation of Afro-Brazilian Cults of Bahia, was responsible for issuing permits at that time, and they adopted a politics of authentication that alienated men from the business, in contrast to the policy later followed by ABAM. As a female, Eliene was able to get the permit, so her brother cooked and she sold the acarajés, in order to respect the tradition. Having a child selling acarajés was also a good advertisement. Eliene became a popular baianinha (a little baiana), who clients found cute and enjoyed buying from and being photographed with. With time, Eliene learned from her brother how to cook the acarajé, and became a fully-fledged baiana. She also became a single teenage mother at sixteen and, with new economic pressures, decided to open her own trading point. She wanted to work at the Historic Center, but FENACAB would not allow this. Tireless, Eliene opened an official trade point in front of the city forum, whilst also operating an illegal stall at the Historic Center, where she worked from midnight to 3AM, when police surveillance was reduced. When ABAM replaced FENACAB as the regulatory body, Eliene was able to make her business at the Historic Center official and she has worked there ever since. After having her first child, Eliene felt lost and hopeless. She was invited by friends to attend a number of different evangelical churches. Eventually, she settled at the Neo-Pentecostal Deus é Amor. She liked the environment

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and especially enjoyed the lively worship songs and the prayer sessions. With time, she ‘gave her life to Christ’ and became a fully committed ‘bornagain’ Christian. For many years, she has attended church every Sunday for main service and Bible studies, and, when she can, she attends Monday meetings, dedicated to the church’s businessmen and women. She has a daily devotional routine and is an active lay leader. Eliene told me she does not ‘waste’ food by making ‘ritual’ offerings. However, she does give acarajés (not exactly seven) to street children as an act of Christian charity and ‘consecrates’ her food with prayers before starting sales. The acarajé trade has allowed Eliene to buy a house and attend to her family’s basic needs, which she attributes to God’s empowering influence over her work life. Eliene’s opinion about Candomblé is mostly mediated by her brother’s case. According to her: ‘My brother consumed so much liquor [cachaça], which people gave to ‘his slaves’ [slave spirits] … I used to tell him: This will destroy your liver. But he kept saying: No, the one who’s drinking is so-and-so [the spirits’ names], not me’. Her brother became an alcoholic, his sales fell sharply, which, according to her, was caused by his incapacity to ‘feed’ the spirits that cared for his business with the expensive sacrifices they required. He did try to convert to evangelical Christianity, but his ‘deliverance’ process misfired: He went to an evangelical church, brought his necklaces [made for the spirits] and broke them. The spirit immediately ‘got’ him [possessed him] and almost broke his legs. The spirit threatened him in church, so we could all hear: ‘I’ll throw you under a car’. My brother was afraid, too weak, so he was not delivered.

After a few more painful months, he died of cirrhosis. Despite her personal trauma and negative view of Candomblé, Eliene does not see these opinions as relevant to her work, building a sharp line between the tradition she represents and its religious origins. She defined the acarajé as ‘a food of African origins’, formerly used by female slaves to sustain their families. It is not religious, at least in a reduced sense. Like any food, it has been given to humanity by God to be eaten or sold, regardless of one’s religion. She defined the baiana attire as ‘modelled according to what the slaves wore’, and considers this a historical and cultural link devoid of any spiritual influence. She dresses like a baiana ‘as policemen dress with their uniform’. She considers it a work duty, but also something that makes her beautiful and proud. She makes her own dresses, headbands and necklaces. ‘It’s heritage, something we should take care of’. Eliene mentioned a number of everyday cases of evangelical intolerance of her style of dress; for example, when she is taking a bus to work and people change seats to avoid proximity to her. She attributes these gestures to a weak faith, which she considers ‘a disease’: My pastor told me that when we are really a man or a woman of God, we’re free to interact with anyone, to do anything we will. Sometimes, my baiana friends

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do their lavagens [a syncretic tradition of washing Catholic church stairs] in churches. After I converted, I just avoided going. Now I go and even help. It’s just a tradition for me, nothing bad. Sometimes they have parties at ABAM with beer. I go and dance a lot. I love samba. I don’t need to drink to have fun.

Before going to work she often stops at her church for prayers fully dressed as a baiana, which has led to fellow converts becoming more accepting of this esthetics. Eliene clearly sees herself as a role model for baianas who are both evangelical and respectful of their African heritage, and through her work at ABAM she has been able to persuade many other evangelical peers to comply with the baianas sartorial code. Eliene’s approach to her trade’s intangible heritage status is generally pragmatic. She is certainly happy with the beautiful memorial built by IPHAN to celebrate the baianas de acarajé at Pelourinho and proud of the fact that 25 November has been designated as Baiana de Acarajé Day by the state government. But she is mostly interested in what kinds of benefits such status can bring to her and her colleagues, how heritage can assist actually existing baianas to live a more dignified life. From this perspective, debates about the ‘religious’ or ‘cultural’ nature of their material culture become much less pressing.

Conclusion: Vitality, Controversies and Boundary Objects According to Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2004), ‘intangible heritage’ is a hybrid category, drawing qualities from both ‘cultural’ and ‘natural heritage’. Like monuments, artworks and buildings, intangible heritage is historical and human-made, and like ecosystems, it is alive, dynamic and in motion. The concept is an attempt to breathe cultural life into UNESCO’s earlier architectonic and archaeological concept of history, and it renders vitality the paramount criteria orienting this specific type of heritagization: ‘if it is truly vital, is does not need safeguarding; if it is almost dead, safeguarding will not help’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2004: 56). If so, in contrast to Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s model, the heritagization of the baiana de acarajé craft seems to represent a third case: a case of excessive vitality. IPHAN’s intervention involved proposing an authoritative prototype for a cultural phenomenon that had been threatened precisely by its dazzling growth. It may be seen as a prototypical case of controversial heritage: of heritage established amidst controversy, both as a response to controversy and as stance within that controversy. As explained in the first section of this chapter, the social biographies of the acarajé and the baiana may be characterized as success stories, marked by a progressive amplification of producers and consumers. This success, however, involved a number of material and symbolic transformations. The bean fritter is deemed to have arrived in Brazil as a sacred food marketed in the public arena according to religious regulations. This religious-economic

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continuum was progressively interrupted as these figures shifted from the margins to the centre of Bahia’s hegemonic discourse, from ‘vile food’ and uncivilized trader to iconic symbols of Bahianess. These transformations of the acarajé and the baiana were closely associated with a transformation of the image of Candomblé terreiros from secretive orders and gatherings of charlatans into a local symbol bank, from which ethnic value could be extracted for various purposes. Yet, during this process, the acarajé was also cut away from its genetic link with the baiana herself and became a plain commodity, marketed in restaurants and supermarkets, processed, powdered and produced in series. Evangelicals, nonetheless, re-enchanted the baiana de acarajé assemblage through confrontation, and unleashed all sorts of public claims about what it is. I suggest that the significance of the evangelical intervention in the biography of the baiana de acarajé’s is not so much in how this religious group altered the food’s name or questioned its trade’s tacit rules of decorum, but rather in how they recast this phenomenon as the object of a controversy. By so doing, evangelicals dislodged the baiana and the acarajé from their conventional frames of recognition and incited an agonistic but still socially and politically effervescent moment. During these debates, different social actors behaved as sociologists – criticizing, examining and defining what this tradition is – but also as policymakers, weaving alliances around specific views of what it should be. Things are propitious to incite and trace controversies because they are nested with an exceeding number of latent possibilities (Keane 2003; Balkenhol, this volume). They circulate across domains and groups as what Keane (2003) calls ‘bundles’ of qualities, gathering of properties open to various forms of appropriations. ‘Bundling’ is indeed ‘one of the conditions of possibility for … the “biography” of things, as qualisigns bundled together in any object will shift in their relative values, utility, and relevance, across contexts’ (Keane 2003: 414). One of the effects of making the material culture, meanings and agencies of the baiana de acarajé part of a spiral of controversy was to turn a diachronic and linear set of transformations into a synchronic set of potentialities laid in front of actors. Suddenly the acarajé and the baiana became potentially religious, cultural, political and economic all at once or in particular combinations. They started operating as what Star and Griesemer (1989: 393) call ‘boundary objects’: ‘objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to the local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites’. As such, the acarajé and the baiana became a platform for different actors to articulate their sensibilities publicly, but also an interactional space, within which these different stances rubbed against each other, translated themselves to each other, and eventually transformed in interaction with each other. Among the terreiros, the controversy amplified ongoing debates about the axé and popular culture, or how Candomblé-originated materiality

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should be treated when it is inside and outside the circumscribed ‘religious’ domain of the temples. Among evangelicals, it elicited theological arguments regarding the material agency of demons and juridical arguments about freedom of religion. The alliance between terreiros, ABAM, sectors of the black movement and academics was itself built upon the baiana and the acarajé as multifarious bundles of qualities allowing the orchestration of various interest groups around questions of gender, race and reparation, labour, African ancestry, Bahian identity and religious intolerance. Whereas both these camps proposed definitions of what these boundary objects ultimately were, only the latter was able to access the state’s sovereign power to authenticate definitions and render them normative through metacultural artefacts, such as ordinances, heritage reports, lists, memorials and workshops. From this perspective, then, we could assume that evangelicals ‘lost’ this controversy, whereas the alliance around ABAM ‘won’ it. But to see this as a simple case of victory and defeat would miss the ‘looping effects’ (Hacking 2000) of the controversy – that is, the interactive and perfomative effects of these representational disputes on the very objects and groups they addressed. Evangelicals were indeed defeated in their attempt to encompass the acarajé through a Christian branding strategy, which was deemed by the state to be inauthentic and even illegal. But this controversy has also changed evangelical engagement with heritage in at least two ways. First, as I showed in the case of Eliene, the heritagization of the baiana de acarajé craft has triggered changes in evangelical baianas’ sensibility regarding African heritage. The extent to which these changes are mandatory or a matter of choice does not really matter. What matters is that the canonization of specific aspects of their everyday practices as essential and nonnegotiable has challenged evangelical baianas to learn how to dissociate the ethnic and religious components of their work’s history and their own selfpresentation. It has led evangelical baianas such as Eliene to reflect more thoroughly on the prejudices of her evangelical peers, yet such reflection is undertaken from a position within the faith. In Eliene’s case, her conclusions related to the strength or weakness of faith, rather than to liberal or multiculturalist notions of ‘tolerance’ (see also Bakker, this volume). Second, it is important to notice that the baiana de acarajé was only one among a number of similar controversies in which evangelicals claimed to be alienated from the Candomblé-based conception of Bahia. From this angle, another important looping effect of this defeat was a recognizable change in this group’s overall strategy on the battlefield. Instead of simply countering official heritage discourse as partial and favourable to Candomblé, evangelical leaders in Salvador have more often, in recent years, mimicked heritage discourse, reclaiming heritage status for their own material religion in order to pluralize the idea of Bahia from within. Moreover, this has been a successful strategy. For instance, after years of evangelical noise-making about a series of state-sponsored Orisha

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statues at the Tororó Dike (Reinhardt 2007: 91–97; Sansi 2007: 165–84), they recently received a response from the city administration. Instead of withdrawing the statues from the dike, the administration opted to build a ‘Bible Square’ elsewhere, in the centre of which was placed a statue of two large hands holding the open Scriptures. Salvador city council has gone as far as declaring the Bible to be part of the intangible heritage of Bahia. Although this happened in early 2016, it can be seen as part of a new, more redistributive approach to religion and heritage in Salvador triggered by the baiana de acarajé affair and other similar controversies. To assume that the alliance around ABAM simply won this controversy is also to ignore how the effects of heritagization in this case are still undetermined, beyond the most immediate purpose of countering evangelical innovations. Here it is important to recall that, because it is oriented towards the problem of vitality, the politics of intangible heritage tend to be more about processes than products, masters than masterpieces. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2004: 59–61) illustrates this point through the Japanese shikinen sengu tradition of disassembling and resembling sacred sanctuaries while transmitting this practical knowledge to new generations, a 2,000 year-old process generating products that last no longer than twenty years. In sum, whereas the question of differentiating original masterpieces from illegitimate copies is key to cultural heritage policies, intangible heritage policies are primarily about encouraging the reproduction of authentic or proper copies (Hayden 2010). Given the heightened vitality of the concrete tokens it is supposed to typify and authenticate, IPHAN’s authoritative prototype of the baiana de acarajé’s craft inevitably looks nostalgic (Berliner 2012). Whereas the prototypical baiana nurtures an uninterrupted bond with her tradition’s ‘sacred origins’, everyday baianas embrace a plurality of religious adhesions and have contingent, or even absent, relations to their craft’s spirituality. Cooking techniques, recipes and ways of eating have changed to adapt to new circumstances and tastes. Gender and racial lines have been recently crossed. One can become a baiana by learning this craft through methods akin to the oral traditions evoked by IPHAN’s report or through cooking classes and workshops. In sum, one of the unintended effects of canonizing a phenomenon with such vitality is making most of its everyday manifestations look at odds with its official prototype. Moreover, as shown in both Rita’s and Eliene’s cases, if ‘faking’ can be used in an accusatory tone to reject evangelical innovations, acting ‘as if’ you were a baiana may also be a generative means for becoming a ‘genuinely made up’ (Van de Port 2012) baiana.11 Considering all these disjunctures, we might ask: Why actually propose such a prototype? The answers, again, must be sought at the level of what this process of canonization does, rather than whether or not it is objectively accurate. I have already recognized two such interventions in this chapter. The first, a successful intervention, is the standardization of the trade’s ethnic

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markers or what I called the establishment of a procedural market reserve, based upon how one performs it. The second appeared through Rita’s transparent desire to reconnect the acarajé’s ethnic component to its religious essence by making use of ABAM’s regulatory power to ‘filter’ those who receive work permits. Given the large number of active nonCandomblé affiliated baianas and potential legal limitations concerning their religious freedom, I consider the project of re-establishing a religious market reserve for this trade unlikely to succeed. During our conversations, however, Rita also mentioned a third intervention, which exemplifies the tendency of the politics of intangible heritage to dovetail into broader debates on cultural ownership and authorship (Leach 2003; Rowlands 2004; Brown 2005). She told me that the next step she envisions for ABAM’s political agenda is to reclaim collective copyrights or ‘diffuse rights’ (direitos difusos) over their tradition, which she deems the most effective form of actually safeguarding their image and food, and not only from evangelical replication. She cited two recent cases that completely excluded the interests of baianas de acarajé. First, the Brazilian exemplar of the ‘Dolls of the World’ collection by Barbie, which is dressed as a baiana. The doll was created without any consultation with baianas and brought no benefits to them. Second, a local businessman who has developed and patented a ‘made in Bahia’ frozen acarajé, producing 35,000 pieces a month for sale in eleven states. Again, this project sought no permission from baianas and brought no benefits to them. Rita’s project, therefore, is to shift from the loose ethnic branding authenticated by IPHAN and local legislation towards actual collective ownership over what they do and who they are as baianas (regardless of religious adhesion), which means that even the acarajé sold by non-baianas would have to pass through ABAM’s ‘filter’, since they represent the custodians of this tradition. The political focus of this third intervention is not so much on restoring the baiana and the acarajé’s religious essence, but on using these boundary objects to renegotiate and redraw their relationship with the market while reclaiming a more enduring ownership over their image and product. This is indeed a more aggregating claim, which encompasses the interests of professionals as different as Rita and Eliene. Regardless of how successful this project may be, it exemplifies how the nostalgic impulse underpinning heritagization is not homogenous, and may be pregnant with multiple inchoate futures. Heritage-making is inevitably retrospective and prospective. It canonizes pasts with futures in mind. In this sense, if the many paradoxes engendered by heritagization can be read as signs of inconsistency or incoherence, they can also indicate that the politics of heritagization is inevitably emergent and untameable. I believe that is the most important lesson to be retained from this case, which can indeed help us to cultivate a critical stance on heritage that is not simply ‘anti-heritage’ (Winter 2013: 533). By simply dismissing the prospects of heritage ‘from below’ as naively unaware of the ideological constraints of such an apparatus, we forget that ‘empowerment’

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is likely to operate in practice not so much through clear-cut notions of agency and well-defined identities, but primarily through the capacity of actors to treat paradoxes as opportunities. Paradoxes afford openings in hegemony and can allow new light to be shed in previously dark spaces. Through the paradoxical cracks in the heritage industry, new voices can be added to the cacophony of democracy, voices struggling to define who they are while acting upon the open-ended futures this machinery safeguards. Bruno Reinhardt is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil. Between 2014 and 2016 he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Utrecht University as part of the HERA project ‘Currents of Faith, Places of History’. His work focuses on Afro-Brazilian religions and Pentecostalism in Brazil and Ghana and orbits around topics such as religious power and authority; religious pedagogy and religious organizations; language, embodiment and material religion; religion, secularism and the public sphere; and the anthropology of ethics. He is author of Espelho ante Espelho: a Troca e a Guerra entre o Neopentecostalismo e os Cultos Afro-Brasileiros em Salvador (Attar/Pronex, 2007), and has published articles in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Anthropological Theory, Religion, Journal of Religion in Africa, Pragmatics and Society and Religião & Sociedade, among others.

Notes  1. Da Costa Lima (2010: 162) argues that ‘the Yoruba-nagô word from which the Brazilian acarajé stems from is certainly akará’, stemming from the way akará sellers used to announced their goods by shouting/singing ‘Ô acara jé ecó olailai ó’. Laroche (2004) agrees with Da Costa Lima and IPHAN’s genealogy, but disagrees with the literal meaning of the Yorurba akara, which he translates as ‘we buy singing’, acarajé meaning ‘a fritter we buy singing’.   2. Lody (2008: 384) also justifies this link by calling attention to the clay pots (gamelas) used by acarajé traders in the past, which are the same used to offer food to the Orishas.   3. The connection between Orishas and specific food trades transcended the acarajé. According to Ferreira Filho (1994: 44): ‘The economic activity varied according to the Orisha. The daughters of Iansã and Xangô sold acarajé; those of Ogum, ox innards, those of Omolú sold sarapatel and fish moqueca. Those of Oxalufã, Oxaguiã e Oxalá were prescribed acaçá, cuscuz, and mingau.   4. The very title baiana de acarajé probably emerged during this moment of nationalization and internationalization of Bahian culture, considering that baiana means literally a female native of Bahia.   5. I did six months of fieldwork in Salvador in 2005 for an earlier research project on religious pluralism centred on the relations between Neo-Pentecostalism and Candomblé, and six more months of fieldwork from 2014–2015 as part a research project on blackness and evangelicalism connected to the HERA project ‘Currents of Faith, Places of History’.

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  6. I have never found a baiana de acarajé who washed the sidewalk where she is supposed to work with lavender. This sounds somewhat extravagant for a mostly lowincome professional group. The representation is probably a generalization of the tradition of Lavagem do Senhor do Bonfim, a syncretic popular celebration in Salvador, when baianas wash the church dedicated to this saint with water, lavender and petals.  7. According to Fenigsen and Wilce (2012: 105), authenticity is fundamentally a morally and semiotically motivated comment on relationships. It therefore can be performed through various ‘modes of authentication’, which relate to each other in terms of either juxtaposition or competition.   8. The same can be said of popular Catholicism in Salvador. Public festivals like the celebration of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim are deemed both religious and cultural, being attended by people with multiple forms of attachment.   9. See http://www.bbc.com/portuguese/noticias/2013/06/130620_baiana_acaraje_rita_ santos_perfil_lgb and http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/6/17/brazil-vendo rs-fifa.html 10. SENAC is a nationwide public organ dedicated to the technical training of the workforce in Brazil. 11. See Lave (2011) and Ingold (2000) for arguments on how acting ‘as if’ is a vital step in any process of apprenticeship and enskillment.

References Adinolfi, M.P. and M. van de Port. 2013. ‘Bed and Throne: The “Museumification” of the Living Quarters of a Candomblé Priestess’, Material Religion 9(3): 282–303. Asad, T. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. _______. 2012. ‘Thinking about Religion, Belief, and Politics’, in R. Orsi (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 36–57. Bacelar, J. 2013. ‘A Comida dos Baianos no Sabor Amargo de Vilhena’, Afro-Ásia 48: 273–310. Barber, K. 1981. ‘How Man Makes God in West Africa: Yoruba Attitudes towards the Òrìsà’, Africa 51(3): 724–44. Barsante, C.E. 1985. Carmen Miranda. Rio de Janeiro: Europa. Berliner, D. 2012. ‘Multiple Nostalgias: The Fabric of Heritage in Luang Prabang (Lao PDR)’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18(4): 769–86. Bitar, N.P. 2011. Baianas de Acarajé: Comida e Patrimônio no Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano Editora. Borges, F.M. 2008. Acarajé: tradição e modernidade, MA Dissertation. Ethnic Studies Department. Federal University of Bahia. Brown, M. 2005. ‘Heritage Trouble: Recent Work on the Protection of Intangible Cultural Property’, International Journal of Cultural Property 12: 40–61.

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Casanova, J. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Collins, J. 2015. Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian Racial Democracy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Comaroff, J.L. and J. Comaroff. 2009. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Da Câmara Cascudo, L. 2004. História da alimentação no Brasil. São Paulo: Global. Da Costa Lima, V. 2010. A Anatomia do Acarajé e Outros Escritos. Salvador: Corrupio. Darylle, W. 2001. Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930– 1945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. De Jong, F. 2007. ‘A Masterpiece of Masquerading: Contradictions of Conservation in Intangible Heritage’, in F. De Jong and M. Rowlands (eds), Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, pp. 161–84. Fenigsen, J. and J. Wilce. 2012. ‘Authenticities: A Semiotic Exploration’, Recherches Anthropologiques 32(1–2–3): 103–22. Ferreira Filho, A. 1994. ‘Salvador das Mulheres: Condição Feminina e Cotidiano Popular na Belle Époque Imperfeita’, MA thesis. History Department, Federal University of Bahia. Freston, P. 1999. ‘“Neo-Pentecostalism” in Brazil: Problems of Definition and the Struggle for Hegemony’, Archives de Sciences Sociales Des Religions 44(105): 145–62. Freyre, G. 1956 [1933]. The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization. New York: Knopf. Foucault, M. 2000. ‘The Subject and Power’, in J. Faubion (ed.), Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984. New York: New Press, pp. 326–48. Giumbelli, E. 2008. ‘A Presença Do Religioso No Espaço Público: Modalidades No Brasil’, Religião & Sociedade 28(2): 80–101. ———. 2014. ‘Recomposing the Nation: Conceptions and Effects of Heritage Preservation in Religious Universes’, Virtual Brazilian Anthropology 11(2): 442–69. Goffman, E. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper & Row. Graham, R. 2010. Feeding the City: From Street Market to Liberal Reform in Salvador, Brazil: 1780–1860. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Hacking, I. 1983. Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2000. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hayden, C. 2010. ‘The Proper Copy’, Journal of Cultural Economy 3(1): 85–102.

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Hewison, R. 1987. The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline. London: Methuen. Holbraad, M. 2006. ‘The Power of Powder: Multiplicity and Motion in the Divinatory Cosmology of Cuban Ifá (or Mana, Again)’, in A. Herrare, M. Holbraad and S. Wastell (eds), Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 189–225. Htun, M. 2004. ‘From “Racial Democracy” to Affirmative Action: Changing State Policy on Race in Brazil’, Latin American Research Review 39(1): 60–89. Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling & Skill. New York: Routledge. IPHAN. 2007. Dossiê 6: Ofício das Baianas de Acarajé. Brasília: IPHAN. Keane, W. 2003. ‘Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things’, Language and Communication 23(3): 409–25. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. 2004. ‘Intangible Heritage as Metacultural Production’, Museum International 56(1–2): 52–65. Kopytoff, I. 1986. ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 64–91. Laroche, M. 2004. ‘Akara, Akra, Acarajé: O Gosto da África nas Américas’, in M. Laroche, C. Scheinowitz and H. Oliveira (eds), Haiti: 200 Anos de Diaspora e Utopias de Uma Nação Americana. Feira de Santana: UEFS. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to ActorNetwork-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lave, J. 2011. Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Leach, J. 2003. ‘Owning Creativity: Cultural Property and the Efficacy of Custom on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea’, Journal of Material Culture 8(2): 123–43. Lody, R. 1998. Santo Também Come. Rio de Janeiro: Pallas. Lühning, A. 1996. ‘“Acabe com este Santo, Pedrito vem aí …”: Mito e Realidade da Perseguição Policial ao Candomblé Baiano entre 1920 e 1942’, Revista da USP, 28: 194–220. Macedo, E. 2005. Orixás Caboclos e Guias: Deuses Ou Demônios? Bispo Macedo. Sao Paulo: Editora Universal. Machado Neto, Z., and Braga, C. 1977. Bahianas de Acarajé: uma categoria ocupacional em redefinição. Salvador: UFBA (mimeo). Martini, G.T. 2007. Baianas do Acarajé: a Uniformização do Típico em uma Tradição Culinária Afro-Brasileira, PhD Dissertation. Department of Anthropology. University of Brasília. Meyer, B. 2009. ‘Introduction: From Imagined Communities to Aesthetic Formations: Religious Mediations, Sensational Forms and Styles of Binding’, in B. Meyer (ed.), Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion and the Senses in the Making of Communities. New York: Palgrave, pp. 1–28.

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Oliveira, M.I. 1988. O Liberto, o seu Mundo e os Outros: Salvador, ­1790–1890. São Paulo: Corrupio/CNPq. Oro, A.P. 2007. ‘Intolerância Religiosa Iurdiana e Reações Afro no Rio Grande do Sul’, in V. Gonçalves da Silva (ed.), Intolerância Religiosa: Impactos do Neopentecostalismo no Campo Religioso Afro-Brasileiro. São Paulo: Edusp, pp. 29–69. Parés, L.N. 2013. The Formation of Candomblé: Vodun History and Ritual in Brazil. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Pinho, O.S. 1998. ‘A Bahia no Fundamental: Notas para uma Interpretação Do Discurso Ideológico Da Baianidade’, Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais 13(36): 109–20. Querino, M. 2011. A Arte Culinária na Bahia. Sao Paulo: Martins Fontes. Ramos, A. 1988. O Negro Brasileiro. Recife: Massagana. Reinhardt, B. 2007. Espelho ante Espelho: A Troca e a Guerra entre o Neopentecostalismo e os Cultos Afro-Brasileiros em Salvador. São Paulo: CNPq/Pronex/Attar Editorial. Reis, J. J. 1993. ‘A Greve Negra de 1857 na Bahia’, Revista da USP 18: 6–30. Rowlands, M. 2004. ‘Cultural Rights and Wrongs: Uses of the Concept of Property’, in C. Humphrey, and K. Verdery (eds), Property in Question: Value Transformations in the Global Economy. Oxford and New York: Berg. Sansi-Roca, R. 2007. Fetishes and Monuments: Afro-Brazilian Art and Culture in the 20th Century. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Santos, V.J.R. 2013. ‘O Sincretiso na Culinária Afro-Brasileira: O Acarajé das Filhas de Iansã e das Filhas de Jesus’, MA dissertation. Federal University of Bahia. Schramm, K. 2015. ‘Heritage, Power and Ideology’, in E. Waterton and S.  Watson (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Heritage Research. New York: Palgrave, pp. 442–57. Schwarz, R. 1992. Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. London: Verso. Skidmore, T. 1974. Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, L. 2006. The Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge. Smith, L. and Akagawa, N. (eds). 2009. Intangible Heritage. London: Routledge. Star, S.L. and J.R. Griesemer. 1989. ‘Institutional Ecology, “Translations” and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology: 1907–39’, Social Studies of Science 19: 387–420. Van de Port, M. 2011. Ecstatic Encounters: Bahian Candomblé and the Quest for the Really Real. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ———. 2012. ‘Genuinely Made Up: Camp, Baroque and the Production of the Really Real’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18: 864–83.

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Verger, P. 1992. ‘Contribuição Especial das Mulheres ao Candomblé do Brasil’, in P. Verger. Verger: Artigos. Sao Paulo: Corrupio, pp. 93–117. Vianna, H. 1977 [1963]. ‘Breve Notícia Sobre a Cozinha Baiana’, in L. Da Câmara Cascudo (ed.), Antologia da Aimentação no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Livros Técnicos e Científicos. Williams, R. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winter, T. 2013. ‘Clarifying the Critical in Critical Heritage Studies’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 19(6): 532–45.

3 Swinging between the Material and the Immaterial

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Brazilian Cultural Politics and the Authentication of Afro-Brazilian Heritage

Maria Paula Fernandes Adinolfi

In this chapter, I trace the transformations that the politics of cultural heritage in Brazil have undergone from establishment in the 1930s onwards. I will focus on the changing place of Afro-Brazilian cultural practices and assets in Brazilian heritage dynamics. For most of its history, the Afro-Brazilian religious practices of Candomblé had been criminalized or practitioners treated as suffering from mental illness. Similarly, the martial art of capoeira had been treated as a criminal affair. A discussion as to how practices such as these eventually made their appearance on heritage lists as ‘immaterial heritage’ throws into sharp relief the kind of disputes and negotiations that occur in pluralist societies when formerly disenfranchised actors demand inclusion in narratives of the nation. My focus on Afro-Brazilian cultural practices and assets – particularly Candomblé – also highlights how heritage formations are inextricably entangled with a broader struggle for political rights. The Brazilian nation state has long portrayed itself as a melting pot, where cultures (and ‘races’) have merged to form a distinctively mixed national identity. However, Afro-Brazilians and other minority ethnic groups had no real access to rights and citizenship until after the introduction of the Constitution of 1988. It was only then that their claims for political participation and social equality gained expression in law and public policies. Most of the rights granted have assumed the form of cultural rights: culture (and ethnicity) has become the language in which social differences and social rights are articulated (see also Reinhardt; Bakker, this volume).

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Tracing the changing status of Afro-Brazilian cultural expressions reveals that the notion of ‘heritage’ in Brazil is anything but a stable category. Indeed, when Afro-Brazilian actors entered the different arenas where cultural heritage was discussed, this not only meant a re-evaluation of the value of Afro-Brazilian cultural expressions, but also a reconfiguration of ideas as to what constitutes heritage itself. This becomes particularly visible in the way the new notion of ‘immaterial’ or ‘intangible’ heritage has been played out in the negotiations. What this chapter brings to the fore, then, is the ways that the notion of ‘heritage’ is constantly reassembled, as new actors put it to work in their particular modes of world-making. My investigation must logically start with the institution in charge of formulating and applying cultural heritage policies in Brazil: the National Historical and Artistic Heritage Institute (IPHAN), founded in 1937 under the name of National Historical and Artistic Heritage Service (SPHAN). Although now part of the Ministry of Culture, it is much older than the Ministry itself, which was created only in 1985. In fact, it was the first official body concerned with cultural politics in the country, formed by intellectuals concerned with the quest for an authentic national identity. As Fonseca (2001) states, SPHAN’s foundation instituted relations between the state and culture in Brazil, both in the sense of creating an institutional framework and also of establishing ties between intellectuals and the state. Both for the populist government of President Getúlio Vargas and for the artists and intellectuals linked to the avant-garde movement known as Modernism, redefining the meaning of ‘national’ was an urgent task in the 1930s. While Brazilian society was undergoing a rapid process of industrialization and urbanization, modernist intellectuals turned their eyes to the rural grassroots Brazil and to socially and politically subsumed ethnic groups – black and indigenous – in search of features that could distinguish Brazil as an original civilization, formed as the result of the mixture of ‘the three races’– black, indigenous and white. The modernist project was audacious, proposing an ‘anthropophagic’ way of absorbing different cultural influences at a time when, over the four previous decades, Brazil had received over 3 million European and Japanese immigrants, who significantly altered the population profile. Modern Brazil should incorporate new cultural forms, but without disregarding its traditions, in which ‘the true soul of the nation’ dwelled. The second modernist manifesto, by Oswald de Andrade (1928), called Manifesto Antropófago, celebrates the creative power of what it considers to be the founding act of the nation: the eating of the Jesuit priest Dom Sardinha (whose name ironically means sardine), the first bishop of Brazil, by Caeté indians, in 1554 (the manifesto is dated ‘the 374th year of the Swallowing of Bishop Sardinha’).1 Tradition and modernity, rural and urban, far from being mutually exclusive, were the two sides of the modernist Janus face. President Vargas’ populist project of a modern nation (Estado Novo) strongly rooted in its traditions turned into a dictatorship between

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1937 and 1945. Nevertheless, some modernists remained connected to the government, mostly due to the action of the head of the Ministry of Education and Health (to which IPHAN was then linked), Gustavo Capanema, who acted as a mediator between these related but not entirely coincident projects. What the governmental project certainly lacked was the focus on cultural diversity (with an emphasis on the cultural practices of those of African and indigenous descent) and on its multiple forms of expression, which characterized Mário de Andrade’s plans for the creation of IPHAN (Cavalcanti 2000; Fonseca 2001). Mário de Andrade was one of the founders and most important members of the modernist movement and, besides being an avant-garde writer, he was himself a researcher of folklore. He travelled to the north-east of Brazil in the 1920s to gather traditional folk songs, and in 1938, as the head of São Paulo City Cultural Department, he organized the Mission of Folkloric Research (Missão de Pesquisas Folclóricas) to six states in the north-east and north of Brazil, which resulted in a vast collection of phonographic and photographic material. In 1936 he was requested by the Ministry of Education and Health to develop a project to create an institution to protect national cultural heritage. Due to divergent viewpoints on how to proceed in the safeguarding of heritage, however, his project was discarded and an alternative approach, designed by Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade, became the basis for Decree n. 25, which instituted IPHAN in 30 November 1937 (Chagas 2006). The only tradition then acknowledged by IPHAN as cultural heritage was that represented by ‘assets’ connected to the Brazilian colonial past  – that is, to Luso-Brazilian architecture and fine arts, which very much embodied the habitus of the Brazilian upper classes. Nevertheless, African and indigenous expressions such as Candomblé and Capoeira started to be tolerated under Vargas’s government, and were no longer treated as criminal affairs or mental illnesses as they had been in the early republican years, from 1889 until the 1930s, when eugenetic whitening projects ruled. They were not, however, granted the distinction of cultural heritage. Contrary to Mário de Andrade’s plan, folklore was not incorporated into the sacrosanct national legacy and played a very marginal part in cultural policy: no funding was provided nor official action undertaken to investigate or safeguard ‘popular’ cultural practices as national cultural heritage until the 1970s. On the other hand, such practices played a very important role in the symbolic construction of the nation: being cleaned of their ‘ethnic’ marks that identified them as black or indigenous, they became ‘popular’ and consequently ‘national’. Thus, samba and capoeira became icons of the nation – without, however, being recognized as cultural heritage, demonstrating the conservativeness of the national heritage field. The modernists and Vargas regime had one more thing in common: both cherished the image of Brazil as a ‘melting pot’ and adhered to the

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concept of ‘racial democracy’. These ideas have since been powerful tools to interpret and represent Brazil. They were shaped by scholars such as Gilberto Freyre, who wrote the classic book Casa Grande & Senzala (literally, ‘The Big House and the Slave Quarters’, translated to English as The Masters and the Slaves (1933)) and acquired great strength through literary productions and artworks, as much as through the media and political discourses. ‘Racial democracy’ has been so much inculcated in common sense representations that it might be considered a founding myth of the nation. It started to be referred to as a ‘myth’, understood as fake reality or racist ideology by its opponents: black activists and left-wing intellectuals, who, in the 1970s, started making strong claims for political participation, social equality and representation in national narratives. An extensive sociological literature has critically revised the concept of ‘racial democracy’ from the late 1960s onwards (Fernandes 1965; Ianni 1966; Hasenbalg 1979; Nascimento 1978; Viotti da Costa 1985, etc.). In recent years, however, some anthropologists have argued that racial democracy can also be considered a myth in the sense of a discursive structure that organizes collective perceptions and self-representations and that provides a particular understanding of the world and of people’s lived experiences; not as something that merely ‘hides’ social inequalities and privilege, but a device that reveals how Brazilians think about themselves and ideally project the social world (Fry 1995–96; Schwarcz 1999). On the other hand, black movement actors continue to stress the importance of deconstructing or overcoming the myth of racial democracy and of creating counter-hegemonic representations of blackness and Africanness. As opposed to the ‘false’ ideology of a harmonic racial mixture, blurred racial borders and homogeneous national culture, the bipolar racial ideology constitutes the departure point for political pleas, like the affirmative action programme, and is based on multicultural principles, asserting black people’s right to self-representation, in order to institute a ‘true’, ‘authentic’ version of national history. This cleavage of viewpoints regarding national identity and the politics of representation has been the subject of divisive polemics both within the social sciences and within contemporary Brazilian politics and raises important issues around the debate on authenticity.

Materiality, Authenticity and Universal Artistic Value The trajectory of IPHAN’s cultural heritage politics follows the general trend that guided politics in Brazil: it departs, in the 1930s, from a universalist and assimilationist approach that aimed to dissolve ethnic or cultural differences into a ‘national culture’, understood as a homogeneous blend, in which Indian and black people were absorbed as part of ‘the folk’. Instituting the legal instrument of tombamento, the designation of material cultural assets – that is, arts and architecture, to be recognized

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as cultural heritage, IPHAN consolidated a certain view of what cultural heritage meant and which values were attributed to it. Monumentality was a central feature, as was exceptionality and authenticity. Authenticity here was used in the sense of trustworthy authorship, but as will be shown below, the concept developed beyond this limited use. Most of the assets that were tombados (listed as national cultural heritage) were churches, mansions and artworks from the colonial period, especially those pertaining to the baroque style. Colonial villages and city centres in Minas Gerais, Bahia and Pernambuco were tombados as historical sites. All the references alluded to Luso-Brazilian construction techniques, lifestyles, imagery and religiosity: the gilded Franciscan church altars, sacred Catholic sculptures, ruined sugar mills, mints in gold mining sites or urban and rural houses of the colonial elite. Colonial baroque became a synonym for cultural heritage and vice versa. In terms of proceedings, the decision about whether or not something should be tombado was made by architects, and by a very small number of historians and other ‘technicians’, as they are suggestively called within the institution. Indeed, since IPHAN’s ‘heroic period’, 2 such decisions have been considered as made on ‘technical’ grounds, based on what were understood as the assets’ ‘inherent’ artistic qualities or ‘obvious’ historical importance for the building of narratives of the nation.3 The universality of such artistic value was taken for granted: it appeared not as a taste ascribed to a certain social group, historically and socially shaped: a distinctive habitus, to use Bourdieu’s (1984) concept, but as a self-evident truth that emanated from the objects and buildings. According to Márcia Chuva, ‘words like “rationalization”, ‘truth’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘legitimacy’ necessarily integrated its (architectonical) vocabulary, which, in Brazil, consecrated the modernist trend in Architecture’ (2003: 320). Chuva goes on to describe the views of Lúcio Costa, the leading architect and possibly the most influential modernist intellectual within SPHAN, as the agency was still known. To Costa: the architecture would provide the nation with materiality, and this should be the primordial function of SPHAN – give concreteness to the nation, not only by unveiling to all Brazilians something that, although existent, had been hidden; but also effectively building that materiality. (Chuva 2003: 320)

Here, we can see strong ties between the meanings of authenticity, materiality and universal artistic value, epitomized by the baroque style. The cultural capital of the ‘technicians’ would suffice to establish what authentic cultural heritage was. Their authority was the only resource mobilized to transform their aesthetic dispositions favouring architecture and the baroque into a doxa (Bourdieu 1984). The place assigned to black and indigenous people in the heritage field was that of ‘contributors’, who helped, with their forced labour, to create the wealth and splendour of baroque civilization. Even when some

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Figure 3.1  An example of baroque heritage: the prophet Isaías by sculptor Aleijadinho. Late eighteenth century, Congonhas do Campo, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Photo by Mattijs van de Port. Published with permission.

of the listed works were made by black or ‘mixed’ people, such as the renowned eighteenth century carver Antonio Francisco Lisboa, nicknamed Aleijadinho (whose 66 wood sculptures portraying the Lord’s Passion and 12 soapstone sculptures portraying the prophets in Congonhas, Minas Gerais, are one of the colonial masterpieces, listed as National Heritage in 1939 and as World Heritage in 1985), they were never recognized as ‘Afro-Brazilian heritage’ but always as ‘national’ (Figure 3.1). The former category was only coined in the 1980s, for reasons that are explored below. Even when strong ‘intangible’ black cultural practices took place in a Catholic church, which historically had been one of the very few legitimate places for black forms of association in colonial society, this factor was never seen as a relevant historical fact to be taken into account when making decisions regarding designation. In Salvador, Bahia, we have the example of the Igreja da Nossa Senhora da Barroquinha (Church of Our Lady of Barroquinha), built in 1723 and listed in 1941. There, in the mid eighteenth century, enslaved and freed black women, mostly from Ketu (or belonging to the meta-ethnic denomination Ketu),4 created the Sisterhood of Our Lady of Good Death, which had strong connections with the formation of the first Candomblé temples in Bahia, and is considered today a key institution in the transmission and reinterpretation of Afro-Brazilian religious expertise, and furthermore in the elaboration of an Afro-Brazilian culture and identity (see Silveira 2006). In the processo de tombamento of

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that church, however, there is no mention of this fact.5 One can argue that in 1941 this fact was not known: at least not in scholarly and governmental circles (among Candomblé adherents it certainly was). But the same cannot be said about the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary (Igreja de Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Homens Pretos), in the same city, which was built during the entire eighteenth century by a black men’s brotherhood devoted to Our Lady of the Rosary. The church, tombada in 1938, was inscribed in the Fine Arts book.6 The fact that it had been built by and had belonged to a black men’s brotherhood is mentioned only as ‘historical context’, but this is not the reason for the tombamento. As usual, the value is architectonical: the rococo pediment and neoclassical altars are the prized elements of the church, whilst its architectural prominence is highlighted by an urbanistic remark: ‘It is an outstanding monument in the city’s landscape’. Its inscription in the Fine Arts book, but not in the Historical, and not even in the Ethnographic records, leaves no doubt about what the value attributed to this ‘monument’ was.7

Ethnographic Collections and the First Attempts of Patrimonializing Afro-Brazilian Religiosity IPHAN’s focus on colonial heritage in its initial ‘heroic’ years allowed the listing of some ethnographic collections, including that of the Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi (in Pará, an Amazonian state) in 1940 and those of the Museu Paranaense and the Museu Coronel David Carneiro (both in Paraná, Southern Brazil), in 1941. These collections were mostly comprised of ‘popular’ or indigenous artefacts at the time of their designation, although later they were supplemented with Afro-Brazilian or African objects. The very first collection to be registered, in 1938, and inaugurating the Archaeological, Ethnographic and Landscape book, was the ‘Black Magic Museum’ (Museu da Magia Negra), in Rio de Janeiro. The museum was created as a result of police actions against the terreiros de Candomblé, the temples of one of the various modalities of Afro-Brazilian religions. In fact, ‘Black Magic Museum’ was the name given through the act of tombamento to the Civil Police Academy Museum,8 instituted in 1912. This museum was meant to serve both as a warehouse for materials confiscated in police operations and as a pedagogic resource for the Academy (Correa 2008). The terreiros were often invaded and their cultic objects confiscated,9 on the grounds of Article 157 of the 1890 Criminal Code, which defined as crime the actions of ‘practicing spiritism, magic and sortilege, using charms and fortune-telling to raise feelings of hatred or love, to inculcate the healing of healable or unhealable diseases, that is, to fascinate and subjugate public credulity’. Along with objects linked to gambling, drug use, money falsification, ‘subversive activities’ and weapons used to commit murders, Candomblé objects were displayed in the Civil Police Museum.

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Like the others, they were evidence of crime; in their case, the crime of witchcraft and charlatanism (Ribeiro 2005). In the light of the mainstream designation guidelines discussed above, it is difficult to understand, at first glance, the logic in applying tombamento to such a collection. Nevertheless, as Correa (2008) suggests, if we consider the connections between Brazilian modernists and European artistic vanguards, such as Surrealists, Cubists and Dadaists, which were profoundly fascinated and influenced by the ‘discovery’ of ‘primitive art’ (as described, for example, by Price 1989; see also Rhoda Woets’ contribution in this volume), their distinction as cultural heritage becomes more comprehensible. It suggests that the phenomenon portrayed by Clifford (1988) as ‘ethnographic surrealism’ – a conjunction of ethnographic and avant-garde artistic practices in 1920s–30s France – also had its Tupiniquim version in the Brazilian modernists. The acute modernity of those ‘fetishes’ and their ‘anthropophagic’ symbolic power were certainly appreciated by the modernists involved in their listing. The inclusion of these collections also reflects the loose institutionality in IPHAN’s early years, when decisions for or against the tombamentos were made on very idiosyncratic grounds. There was no standardization of criteria for the listing, and priorities followed personal inclinations, tastes and ‘elective affinities’, as Fonseca (2005) puts it. In this case, the initiative of the Police Museum Director Dante Milano seems to have played a major part. His personal relations with distinguished members of the modernist group, some of whom were also IPHAN personnel, and his own literary activities as a modernist poet, are a clue to understand his concern for the ‘cultural’ – and, furthermore, patrimonial – value of the collection he oversaw (Correa 2007, 2008). Milano’s personal connections may have smoothed the bureaucratic path to achieve the tombamento of the collection: other important Afro-Brazilian collections originated by the same kinds of police procedures did not receive a tombamento. This inconsistency shows that there was no uniform institutional understanding of the ‘real’ value of such artefacts. Whilst local contingencies played a role in these inconsistencies, the value of Candomblé objects was deeply ambiguous for Brazilian society as a whole. There was no listing, for instance, of the Colecão Perseverança, a collection obtained through a massive and very violent 1912 arrest operation in the terreiros of Alagoas in north-eastern Brazil that became known as ‘Quebra de Xangô’ (the ‘Breaking of Xangô’) (Duarte 1974; Lody 2005) and which was subsequently donated to the Geographical and Historical Institute of Alagoas (north-eastern Brazil). No tombamento was issued either for the third remarkable collection of this kind: that of Museu Nina Rodrigues (later renamed as Museu Antropológico Estácio de Lima), which belonged to the Faculty of Medicine of Bahia. Its collection was very similar to that of the Black Magic Museum in Rio, in which objects from the terreiros shared space with material evidence of gambling, drug addiction, theft, murder and

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money falsification. Here the intertwining of medical and criminological knowledge applied to discipline and punishment, very much influenced by Lombroso’s school of criminology, was even clearer than in Rio de Janeiro (Serra 2006), but unlike the Rio collection, its ‘cultural’ value was not recognized. The meaning of Candomblé objects – and practices – was, in the first half of the twentieth century, under dispute: in Gell’s (1998) terms, they were agents which helped the gods to be present among mortals; as well as being ‘proof of crime’; ‘evidence of mental and social pathology’; ‘ethnographic artefacts’; and ‘primitive art’. It is not easy to trace the boundaries between these categorizations or between the people who did the categorizing. Police authorities donated the confiscated objects in Alagoas to the Geographical and Historical Institute in 1912, and in Recife, to the Mission of Folkloric Research in 1938. Moreover, the Police Museum director in Rio saw them as cultural heritage and strove to have them listed as such, yet their display alongside quite different objects seen as evidence of crime showed that they still signified transgressive behaviour. The professor of the Faculty of Medicine of Bahia and psychiatrist Nina Rodrigues, considered the founding father of Afro-Brazilian Studies and a mentor of racist medical knowledge applied to Candomblé, referred to them as ‘Black Fine Arts’. Around 1906, in a study which was posthumously published in 1933, he wrote: In sculpture, though, it is revealed with more security and accurateness the artistic aptitude of the Blacks. Its cultivation and appreciation among the slaves who came to colonize Brazil can be proved as much in inductive presumptions as in the testimony of facts and documents. (Rodrigues 1945: 261)

Rodrigues (1945: 269–73) also stated that Candomblé objects were of ‘value to the ethnographic history of Art’, demonstrating a ‘relatively advanced phase of the human spirit’s evolution’, following Delafosse’s appreciation of Abomey King Behanzin’s throne, exhibited in the Trocadero in Paris. The shifting meanings of Candomblé objects cannot be seen as a straightforward evolution from markers of crime, pathology and backwardness to cultural or artistic valuables, culminating with their canonization as cultural heritage entailing the definitive loss of their symbolic efficacy in religious rites. Rather, these meanings are constantly overlapping, feeding and re-feeding off each other, so that no final or ‘real’ meaning can be asserted. This circulation is exemplified by the fact that those who first authenticated Candomblé objects as cultural heritage were neither the modernist intellectuals, entrenched in the state apparatus, nor the marginalized black agents, who later made them instruments of their identity claims, but the police and medical authorities themselves, the same authorities that devoted themselves to fighting ‘fetishist cults’ and to cleansing Brazilian society of savage, backward African mystifications.

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Ribeiro (1992) has shown that these whitening and disciplining social agents were as involved as Candomblé adherents themselves in belief in witchcraft: they shared those believers’ world views and the categories in which they could be expressed. Recognizing that these objects ‘worked’, they searched a way to neutralize their powers. The first and most common way was the same used for centuries by the Catholic church: a massive and exemplary destruction. But some had to be kept as material proof of crime, for the purpose of legal proceedings and also as sources for research on mental pathologies. These requirements created a necessity for storage, and musealization emerged as a solution to this practical problem. The museum could also be seen, however, as a means of neutralizing the effectiveness of these objects by removing them from the terreiros and displaying them in a secular environment. The patrimonialization, promoted by those agents, could thus be understood as a means of domesticating and managing religious practices, as much as a validation of Afro-Brazilian cultural practices. The first translation of ‘religion’ into ‘culture’, then, may be seen as an attempt to deprive ‘religion’ of its efficacy. ‘Culture’, as a result, becomes its inert and compliant simulacrum. Yet, the evidence presented above suggests that this is not the entire truth, for these elites had a simultaneous fear and fascination for Africanoriginated ‘culture’. Members of the elites, like senior police officer Dante Milano, partook in the modernist sensibility, and felt supported in so doing by a favourable local and institutional context. The complexity of the personal positioning of members of the elite could result in marginalized objects and practices acquiring the ‘cultural capital’ inherent in the category of ‘national heritage’. Postcolonial studies have often pointed out that the binomial inferiorization/fascination is a common trope through which the ‘colonial Other’ is mummified and invisibilized. We have to be wary, though, of simply assuming that ‘patrimonialization meant domestication’. The religious objects not only represent divinities, they still invoke the presence of divinities. They address and involve visitors and staff as what Birgit Meyer (2006) calls ‘sensational forms’, those ‘through which religious practitioners are made to experience the presence and power of the transcendental’. That museum exhibits retain this ‘sensational form’ becomes evident when observing the ways that they have been appropriated by the public, which includes Candomblé adherents. Ribeiro (2005) reported how religious objects are reinvested with a religious meaning when visitors display reverent behaviour, depositing flowers and coins at the statues’ feet. Unlike the artefacts displayed in ethnographic museums in Europe, far removed from their original context, the efficacy of Candomblé objects was never completely neutralized, in part because state agents and museum personnel themselves still believed in their dangerous properties. Moreover, the placement of Candomblé objects in museums has somehow provided them with respectability and a differentiated status, assigned by

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the authority of the museum itself, as a socially legitimate cultural institution. But, in a distinctive Afro-baroque cultural strategy, these meanings are not substituted; they are added. Candomblé objects are neither one thing or the other: they have accumulated meanings. With the creation of genuine ethnographic museums to shelter them, such as the Museu Afro-Brasileiro of the Universidade Federal da Bahia, Candomblé adherents started to spontaneously donate pieces, such as garments, beads, instruments and the personal belongings of deceased terreiro leaders to them, recognizing the museums as ‘lieux de memoires’. The same happened when the collection of Museu Estácio de Lima was transferred to Museu da Cidade, in 1999, as a consequence of the political mobilization of Candomblé adherents (Serra 2006). The matter was taken to court and the Museu Estácio de Lima was requested to send the objects to a historical and art museum; the Povo-deSanto (Candomblé adherents) then donated pieces to the collection, now placed in a museum invested with a completely different social status. One further step along this path is the creation of memorial museums within the terreiros on the initiative of the cultic groups themselves, free of governmental intervention. This process of museification shows that Afro-Brazilian groups have internalized the category of ‘cultural heritage’, acknowledged the social and cultural prestige associated with it and demanded to partake of the rights that it entails.

The Emergence of ‘Black Consciousness’ and the Constitution of a Multicultural Paradigm The Constitution of 1988 was the most important legal marker guaranteeing individual and collective rights in Brazil. The Constitution decisively ended the military dictatorship period that had started in 1964 and officially finished in 1985. The articulation of civil society that resulted in the new Constitution started in 1979, with the Amnesty Law, allowing exiled opposition politicians to return to Brazil. One year before, in 1978, the Movimento Negro Unificado – MNU (Unified Black Movement) was founded, as one of the first civil movements to be institutionalized in the last phase of dictatorship. It took part in pleas for redemocratization of the country, alongside many other emerging social actors, including Catholic Liberation Theology groups, rural and factory (especially steel) workers’ unions, and student, indigenous and feminist groups. One might frame this development as the beginning of a multicultural turn within the Brazilian state, whereby social, political and cultural rights were conferred on so-called ‘minorities’, including indigenous groups and the ‘remnants’ of quilombos. A fundamental trope for the contemporary black movement – retrieving a metaphor used by Abdias do Nascimento in an earlier black movement during the late 1940s – was resistance to the colonial order, mainly through slave rebellions and the formation of maroon communities,10

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the quilombos. The quilombo became the great icon of non-conformity, freedom-seeking and resistance to white exploitation. Brazil was just about to celebrate the centenary of the abolition of slavery, in 1988, and slogans like ‘Comemorar o quê?’ (celebrate what?) and ‘100 anos sem abolição’ (100 years without abolition) set the tune for protests and marches in many places, but especially in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Bahia, Brasília and Rio Grande do Sul. The idea that the abolition was granted as an ‘act of humanitarianism’ by Princess Isabel, in the last year of the Brazilian Empire, widely disseminated in history textbooks and common-sense understandings, was vehemently contested. The black movement argued that the real actors in Abolition were black people themselves, who fought for it against all odds, since the first slave ship docked. The greatest symbol of this fight became Zumbi, the last commander of the largest and longest-lasting quilombo, located in today’s state of Alagoas from the early seventeenth century to 1695. The day of his death – often memorialized as the day of his immortality – 20 November 1695, was instituted in 1978 by the black movement as ‘National Day of Black Consciousness’, in contestation of the officially celebrated date, 13 May, the day the Princess signed the Abolition law (Lei Aurea). Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, many cities declared 20 November a holiday. In 1997, Zumbi was nominated as a National Hero. In 2003, 20 November became a national school holiday and there are claims it should be instituted as a national holiday. Rather than denouncing the ‘essentialist’, ‘invented’ or ‘constructed’ character of these symbolic appeals to Africa or to the quilombo as key means to the authentication of the black political agenda, which some social scientists have done in recent years (Dantas 1988; Vogt and Fry 1996; Agier 2000; Sansone 2002, etc.), it seems more productive and less judgemental to make an effort to grasp how people make sense of their own lives and struggles through them, as these claims are not understood as ‘fakes’ but as deeply experienced embodied truths. As Mattijs van de Port (2004) states, it is important to understand how people transcend the constructedness of their lifeworlds, and to describe and analyse ‘the techniques and the resources that people have at their disposal to believe, in the sense of taking things to be true’ (2004: 6). Contesting both the essentialist and the anti-essentialist approaches, I previously wrote (Adinolfi 2005) that Ilê Aiyê’s11 representation of Africa can neither be understood as an uninterrupted unfolding of tradition, nor simply as a modern, individualistic and competitive ‘urban invention’, which uses ethnic belonging, through exoticizing references to Africa, to create social distinction, as stated by Agier (2000). Following Paul Gilroy, who describes black diasporic cultural practices as a changing same, I understand the ‘reproduction of cultural traditions not in the unproblematic transmission of a fixed essence through time, but in the breaks and interruptions which suggest that the invocation of tradition may itself be a distinct, though covert, response to the destabilizing flux of the post-contemporary world’ (Gilroy 1992: 101). The

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Figure 3.2  Pai Ro, priest from Candomblé, in front of the altar of the caboclo spirit Green Feather. Santo Amaro, Bahia, Brazil. Photo by Mattijs van de Port. Published with permission.

performed invocation of tradition to produce belief is a key to understand the incorporation of the category ‘cultural heritage’ not only into the political agenda, but also into the bodily dispositions and material production of black agents (Figure 3.2).

The 1990s Rush for Heritage I now move to outline the context in which Afro-Brazilian culture emerged as national cultural heritage. As shown above, pleas for social rights by black activists were expressed in a ‘cultural’ language. The displacement of culture to the core of the political arena is distinctive of the shifts in political discourse at the end of the twentieth century, related to the failure of liberal democracy’s universalizing notions of ‘common will’ and ‘popular sovereignty’ as well as the exhaustion of the language of classes and political parties to describe the social. In a context of fragmentation of social actors and emergence of claims around new categories, including gender, race and sexuality, ‘ethnicisms leave the field of folklore and cultural exoticism in which they could until recently be silenced, and assume the language of rights-claiming’, as Montero puts it (1998: 118). That is how the ‘rush for cultural heritage’ can be understood: in a society where culture and ethnicity have become the language in which social differences and social rights are articulated, listing as national heritage is no longer a ‘technical’ matter mainly concerning the bureaucrats involved with its selection, but a recognition increasingly sought by historically marginalized groups. The taken-for-grantedness of what cultural heritage meant, as a doxa that kept black productions off limits, started to be contested: the ‘pedra e cal’ (stone

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and lime) baroque monuments were no longer the only assets to be listed, nor were state agents the only legitimate voices determining such decisions. The listing, in 1986, of the Terreiro da Casa Branca, the Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká, which is reputed to be the oldest and most traditional Candomblé temple in Bahia and possibly in Brazil (Silveira 2006), may serve as an example. As the documentation of this huge process reveals,12 there was a fierce symbolic and political struggle to convince the councillors of the Cultural Heritage Council (which makes the final decision on the tombamento), that it would be possible to list a Candomblé temple. The deeply rooted habitus of valorization of Luso-baroque heritage was confronted with an asset that served ‘suspicious’ religious practices, that was apparently lacking any architectonical value, and – which became the great point of controversy – the cultural value of which resided instead in its ‘intangible’ or immaterial dimension. This intangible quality of the value attributed to the terreiro created impasses regarding the measures to be implemented for its preservation: how to apply the strict legislation of tombamento to a changing, dynamic cultural practice such as Candomblé? It is notable that the judgement was being made on the value of Candomblé as a religious practice, rather than on the temple as a site: something that never occurred with Catholic churches. It took IPHAN four years to conclude the tombamento: a period that saw an endless exchange of letters and technical reports between Salvador and Brasília; consultations with eminent anthropologists; public petitions signed by artists, intellectuals and many others; the mobilization of the press; and negotiations with the alleged landowner of the terreiro (who was not a temple member) over compensation. This case constituted the precedent for all the following terreiros to be awarded tombados, seven of them in Bahia and one in the state of Maranhão. The tombamentos of the 1980s were not the start but the culmination of the inclusion of terreiros de Candomblé in Bahia in the heritage category. Their recognition by the state as an important element of Brazilian popular culture and a sign of Brazil’s singular racial mixture had begun in the 1930s. The Second Afro-Brazilian Congress, held in Salvador in 1937, marked the shift from the eugenic project of whitening Brazil, and consequently erasing signs of Africanness from popular culture, which dominated the first two decades of the twentieth century, to the modernist project of Estado Novo, which appraised African and native heritage as essential elements of the original breeding that produced Brazilian culture. The charter that resulted from the Congress, directed to Bahia’s governor in order to require Candomblé’s legal recognition by the state (at a time when police invasions were still quite common, as described above), is possibly the first document that refers to Candomblé as ‘intellectual heritage’ (herança intelectual) of the black people in Bahia (Ramos 1940). It is remarkable that such heritage is described as an ‘expression of the high feelings of human dignity that it creates among those under its influence’ – that is, as a feeling that cements

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relationships among members of a moral community, which is quite similar to IPHAN’s current concept of ‘cultural reference’, which guides its intangible heritage policies. The document also represents the first attempt to establish public policies for the terreiros, alleging, among other arguments, their particular cultural value: even if such policies meant simply to warrant the terreiros’ right not to be invaded and not to have their members arrested and their sacred objects broken or confiscated. Ethnographies produced by the so-called Afro-Brazilian Studies have played a key role in the process of legitimation of some terreiros de Candomblé, which, not coincidentally, are the same ones that, more than eighty years after their first descriptions, became tombados by IPHAN: Terreiro da Casa Branca (in 1986), Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá (in 2000), Terreiro do Gantois (in 2002) and Terreiro do Alaketu (in 2004). From the ‘founding father’ of Afro-Brazilian Studies, Nina Rodrigues, through other figures such as Arthur Ramos, Édison Carneiro, Ruth Landes, Roger Bastide, Pierre Verger and Vivaldo da Costa Lima, to name just the most prominent, these four terreiros constitute the field in which most Candomblé studies in Bahia have been conducted, which have become broadly recognized,13 and which have established the ‘Candomblé JejeNagô’, or simply the ‘Candomblé Nagô’, or yet ‘Candomblé Nagô-Ketu’ (modalities derived from ritual practices from the Benin Gulf, mainly from Yoruba and Fon-Egbe speaking peoples) as a model of orthodoxy for terreiros de Candomblé all over Brazil; the tombamento, then, simply ratified the strong reputation for authenticity already possessed by those terreiros and deeply experienced by their members, as can be seen in their proud, noble and highly hierarchical gestures, attitudes and speeches, configuring a real ‘royal court habitus’, easily perceived by first-time visitors. The tombamento expressed the recognition of a canon that has been laboriously built in the last seventy years by both intellectuals and Candomblé leaders, who have made great efforts to attribute an aura of respectability to a practice that had long been associated with savagery, libidinous behaviour, mental pathology and crime. The path from being a persecuted and denigrated ‘fetishist’ practice to becoming an icon of baianidade and blackness,14 a ‘symbol bank’ that feeds and is fed by practices and discourses in the fields of literature, arts, entertainment, science and politics in Bahia (Van de Port 2005) or a ‘trademark’ of Bahia (Santos 2005) was a long one. It departed from Candomblé’s decriminalization in the 1930s alongside the positive evaluation of other Afro-Brazilian practices as ‘national symbols’, going through Candomblé’s depiction in Jorge Amado’s novels, Pierre Verger’s pictures, Carybe’s paintings and sculptures and Dorival Caymmi’s songs in the 1950s, continuing with its incorporation by the Tropicália Movement in the late 1960s and attempts at folklorization by Bahian state tourism policies from the 1970s onwards, when it was consolidated as a local and even national symbol. But black activism acted so as to transform its confinement to the ‘folkloric’

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realm of the ‘culturally exotic’, as Paula Montero puts it, into a black identity symbol and a language through which to express political claims. This role as a language of claims was a key factor in inserting Candomblé into the cultural politics agenda and transforming it, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, into a highly evaluated and symbolically disputed domain – despite the great majority of its members still having to face economic penury and enduring harsh clashes with Neo-Pentecostal churches, which have demonized Afro-Brazilian religions and promoted a ‘holy war’ against them.15 An important innovation, though, has been introduced by the tombamento policies: the recognition as cultural heritage of the Terreiro do Bate-Folha, a terreiro of a Bantu-originated ritual modality (‘nation’), called Nação Congo-Angola. In the classic ethnographies of Candomblé, terreiros pertaining to the Nagô ‘nation’ (deemed to be of Yoruba origin) had been described as truly ‘African’ in their traditions. The terreiros Congo-Angola were depicted as less refined in cosmological terms, too syncretic and therefore ‘impure’ – which often implied an accusation of charlatanism. We may tentatively say that the tombamento has provided Bate-Folha with unprecedented visibility, which apparently affected its status among the Povo-de-Santo, which had not been previously broadly recognized as an ‘orthodoxy model’. This reveals an interesting dynamic in the Afro-religious field, especially considering that the tombamento of Bate-Folha was not requested by its own religious leader, but by Mãe Stella, the leader of the prestigious (and then already tombado) Terreiro Nagô Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá. This request seems to be a response to accusations of ‘nagocentrism’ – that is, an over representation of the Terreiros Nagô as a symbol of fidelity to African traditions. By requesting the tombamento, Mãe Stella was legitimating Bate-Folha as the representative of another tradition, corresponding to a different ‘nação de Candomblé’, often neglected and even despised in ethnographies. This tombamento certainly also reflects the mobilization of Bantu terreiros to improve their image, both by alleging their cosmological attachment to complex and pure African religious traditions, especially those of the Bakongo: an ethnic group located in today’s northern Angola, and by creating an association to represent them, alongside other Bantu-originated cultural practices, as Capoeira, suggestively called Associação Cultural de Preservação do Patrimônio Bantu – ACBANTU: that is, Cultural Association for the Preservation of Bantu Heritage. This emergent politics of Bantu authentication has to face a more legitimated form of conferring and displaying authenticity, the evocation of ‘Nagô-Ketu purity’. As can be inferred from the example of Bate-Folha-Opô Afonjá relations, both forms do not necessarily compete directly, but can be understood as part of a single system of value attribution to Afro-religious practices as cultural heritage. These are framed in a context of black social and cultural activisms that have tried to affirm the great diversity of African traditions in

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Brazil, so contributing to pluralize the canon of African purity, and also to strengthen the union among the different terreiros and ‘nations’ to fight religious intolerance – that is, to unite against Neo-Pentecostal attacks, which became the most important issue in Candomblé’s contemporary political agenda. Not only does the role of this politics of Bantu authentication in the system of exchanges and competition in the Afro-religious field need to be studied, but also the ways it institutes a certain aesthetics that (re)shapes or reinforces the elements of the cult that are considered that nation’s diacritical signs, and which are related to their ritual performance: the language employed (in cult hierarchy member titles, names of deities and ritual song lyrics), the patterns of drum beats and the ways of playing them, and the choreography of deities’ dances during possession trance, for instance. An issue to be considered is the impact that the use of Kimbundo or Kikongo as ritual languages, or the use of the names of inquices, rather than orixás, has had on members’ experience of the religion and on ritual dynamics, considering that the Nagô Orixás’ ritual has apparently provided most of the structuring features of Candomblé, which was reinforced by the prestige acquired by Nagô traditions due to ethnographic canonization. Another issue to be considered is who the internal agents concerned with establishing the frontiers between orthodoxy and heterodoxy are. My experience in the field suggests that white, middle class and younger members, and also young black university students and activists who have engaged in Candomblé mainly for political reasons, are often much more concerned with instituting orthodoxy and patrolling its borders than the old black lifelong members. Orthodoxy is displayed in a much more mindful use of ritual language and of playing and singing, while carefully avoiding homogenizing denominations. This mindfulness of orthodoxy can also be seen in Povo-de-Santo’s public marches, especially against religious intolerance, in which Candomblé has always been referred to as the cult of ‘orixás, voduns and inquices’ – that is, made up of the Nagô-Ketu, Jeje and Congo-Angola modalities. The threefold character of Afro-Brazilian religion (recently supplemented by a fourth element, the Candomblé de Caboclo, which can be very roughly described as an imaginative conjunction of indigenous and African religious practices) is a means to both recognize ‘parallel orthodoxies’ and also to broaden the spectrum of allies in Candomblé’s struggle to obtain a marked position in the public sphere. Nevertheless, if we consider less prestigious actors who are competing for legitimation, an attempt to develop Bantu orthodoxy might still be seen as a risky bet, even if the terreiro somehow has historical Bantu origins. This is the case of the Terreiro Viva Deus in the town of Cachoeira, situated in the Recôncavo Baiano, which has applied for the tombamento. This terreiro’s practices are quite heterogeneous, tracing back to various origins. Angola and Nagô rites are central – but the terreiro has adopted many diacritical

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signs, including the name and ritual language, in order to show themselves as authentically Ketu. The consolidation of previously marginal nações, and the emergence of new authenticities, reveals just how much tombamentos have been guided by a logic that presumes the autonomous existence of well-defined and clearly distinguishable ‘nações’, and implies the idea of purity as the cultural value at play. Syncretic, mixed or border-blurring religious practices (which seem, in fact, to constitute the great majority of terreiros) are still regarded by state agents with disapproval, maybe because, as Peter Fry (1986) pointed out, they are ‘too Brazilian’, conveying all the contradictions and hierarchies of Brazilian society, not allowing enough distance to be classified as ‘purely African’ and then marked as exemplary or ­distinctive.

Conclusion: Swinging between the Material and the Immaterial Mário de Andrade’s project for the preservation of cultural heritage was, as seen above, ‘defeated’ in the early constitution of IPHAN, and consequently ‘folklore’, or ‘popular culture’, was proscribed from cultural heritage policies. Nevertheless, there were governmental agencies focused on their research, such as the Comissão Nacional do Folclore (National Commission of Folklore), instituted in 1947 and later transformed into the Centro Nacional de Folclore e Cultura Popular – CNFCP (National Centre of Folklore and Popular Culture). Later, popular culture entered public policies enacted by the Centro Nacional de Referência Cultural – CNRC (National Centre of Cultural Reference) in the 1970s, and the Fundação Nacional Pró-Memoria – FNpM (National Foundation Pro-Memory), created in 1979. These latter arose from the domestic context of redemocratization, and from an international context of contestation by Third World countries of UNESCO’s exclusive concern with tangible heritage, which was denounced as elitist and restrictive (MinC/IPHAN 2006). The category ‘folklore’ also started to be questioned, while ‘popular culture’ was proposed as an alternative. The FNpM was created to reverse the marginal or parallel institutional position that popular culture had occupied in relation to the ‘lime and stone’ heritage. By proposing the incorporation of non-consecrated (Afro-Brazilian or indigenous) assets into the national heritage, FNpM saw itself as committed to the broader struggle to recover citizenship and democracy (Fonseca 2005: 157). From this inflective moment onwards, both national and international cultural heritage agencies worked on concepts, legislation and programmes to include those cultural forms emanating from the historically ‘wretched of the Earth’. The emphasis, though, was on culture’s immaterial or ‘intangible’ aspects. The category ‘intangible culture heritage’ was thus instituted and disseminated. This category is constituted by ‘oral traditions and expressions, including language as a vehicle of the intangible cultural

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heritage; performing arts; social practices, rituals and festive events; knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe; traditional craftsmanship’, as stated in Article 2.2 of UNESCO’s Convention for the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage, held in Paris in 2003. Brazilian legislation (Decree n° 3.551, 4 August 2000, Article 1) includes its own definition: ‘knowledge and knowhow rooted in communities’ daily life’; ‘celebrations … rituals and feasts inscribed in collective experiences of work, religiosity, entertainment and other social life practices’, ‘Expressive forms … literary, musical, plastic, performing manifestations’, as well as ‘places … markets, fairs, shrines, squares and other places that concentrate and reproduce collective cultural practices’. A new legal instrument was created by the same Decree n° 3.551: the Registro: Register of Intangible Cultural Heritage. The Registro differs from tombamento in that it does not imply further legal consequences: no limitations of property rights, no possibilities of confiscation or fines, no restraints on alienation, no compulsory listing and no patrolling of listed assets. The Register is less normative and more about documenting, producing knowledge about and safeguarding the listed cultural practices. IPHAN presupposes the preferably tacit, engaged agreement of the ‘community’ that ‘holds’ the cultural practice on the proposal of its Register. The tombamento, in contrast, can be – and often is – implemented in spite of the owner’s will, ‘on behalf of the nation’s interests’. Finally, the Register is re-evaluated every ten years, after which it can be revalidated or not, while the revocation of a tombamento is a very rare occurrence. As for tangible assets, IPHAN’s intervention measures involve mainly conservation and restoration, while for the intangible assets, the concept employed is ‘safeguarding’, which acknowledges the fluid and changing character of these practices and the impossibility of fixing or preserving them as they are. The concept also recognizes, at least theoretically, a greater role of the ‘community’ in its perpetuation: governmental agencies should be only mediators or facilitators of this process. From 2002 to date, over forty cultural practices have been registered. Some are indigenous, like the Kusiwa body paintings of the Wajapi Indians of Amapá, a state in the extreme northern border of Brazil, and the Iauaretê waterfall, which is a sacred place for some indigenous peoples in the Amazon. Others have a ‘popular’ (which means: not clearly ethnically defined) character, some of them being ‘traditional crafts’ or expertise in making handicrafts: cheese-making in some towns in Minas Gerais; the production of ceramic pots in Espírito Santo; the production of musical instruments, or the making of a certain kind of lace; popular religious feasts, like Festa do Cirio de Nossa Senhora de Nazaré in Belém do Paré; or street fairs, like Feira de Caruaru, in Pernambuco. The other registered practices are Afro-Brazilian: the Samba de Roda from Bahia, the Samba (Partido Alto, Samba de Terreiro and SambaEnredo) from Rio de Janeiro, the Jongo from Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro,

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the Tambor de Crioula from Maranhão, expertise in making Acarajé, a fried pastry originated in Candomblé ritual cuisine (see Reinhardt, this volume), and Capoeira, a multifaceted corporeal practice that might be seen as game, dance, ritual performance, martial art or sport and that also involves playing and singing. These are all broadly recognized as being originally ‘black folk’s stuff’, but while some such as the Jongo, the Tambor de Crioula or the craft of Acarajé, which all remain more or less restricted to a certain geographic area, retained this ethnic character, the Samba (with its local variations) and Capoeira are widespread everywhere in Brazil and have become, more than symbols, powerful metaphors of nationality. By listing them as national heritage, IPHAN redeems its debt to Mário de Andrade’s original project and officializes a common-sensical understanding, omnipresent in the most varied discourses on Brazilian culture. But what does recognizing Afro-Brazilian culture as an ensemble of ‘immaterial’ cultural practices mean? Or, to rephrase the question, what does having immateriality as its encompassing locus mean to AfroBrazilian culture? We saw that materiality is associated with a hegemonic habitus and with notions of universal artistic value, monumentality and authenticity; lime and stone assets are the canonical or the consecrated national cultural assets. This emic patrimonial jargon used to refer to material assets clearly draws from a religious vocabulary, and religion, or religiosity, is generally the ultimate realm of authenticity. In everyday conversations at IPHAN where I’ve been working as an anthropologist – or, to give my official job title, a Technician of Social Sciences – in Bahia, expressions like ‘o patrimônio de verdade’ (the true heritage) or ‘o patrimônio mesmo’ (what is really heritage) often escape almost unconsciously from my colleagues’ lips to refer to architectonical assets, when contrasted to this imprecise and still somewhat humorously regarded thing called ‘intangible heritage’. IPHAN is an institution comprised of architects and engineers, and only after the public contest through which I was hired, in 2006, were anthropologists, historians, art historians, museologists and archaeologists integrated into its staff. The lack of prestige of intangible heritage is so persuasive that, by magical contact, it is transferred to us, the ‘technicians’ who deal with it. Some of my colleagues at IPHAN only came to know who I was and what I did there when, after about a year, I wrote and edited a book on the intangible cultural heritage of Cachoeira, a town in Reconcavo Baiano, and distributed it as an IPHAN publication. With that material object in their hands, they could, finally, make sense of what Paula did there. Prior to this publication, when I travelled to Cachoeira to spend four or five days doing participant-observation at the Festa da Boa Morte as research for the book, most people would just laugh, or grumble, gossiping about how I must have spent the diárias (the daily stipend a technician receives when travelling).

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This anecdote reveals how important materiality is in the institutional habitus of IPHAN. This institutional bias has not gone unnoticed by black people seeking to claim their share in national heritage. There is an increasing effort to appropriate and translate the consecrated heritage categories, devices and loci into Afro-Brazilian terms. Let us consider some examples. The preliminary studies for the tombamento of the Terreiro da Casa Branca, in the early 1980s, were carried out by a project called MAMNBA (Mapeamento de Sítios e Monumentos Religiosos Negros da Bahia) (Bahian Black Religious Sites and Monuments’ Mapping). What was being called ‘site’ and ‘monument’ – the two dominant categories of material ­heritage – were the terreiros and other sacralized spaces, such as Parque São Bartolomeu. This ‘re-semantization’ was obviously not casual: a project entitled ‘Mapeamento dos Terreiros de Candomblé da Bahia’ (Bahian Terreiros de Candomblé’s Mapping) would have unlikely, in the early 1980s, received funding or institutional support, nor were the mapped terreiros likely to have been designated as cultural heritage. My understanding here is that this re-semantization was a fundamental requirement in order to institute some groups, and their heritage, as subjects of cultural rights, in a process very similar to that interpreted by Arruti (2006) in regard to the ‘maroon remnants’. And this re-semantization is what allowed, twenty-five years later, in 2006, a project called ‘Salvador’s Terreiros de Candomblé’s Mapping’ to be not only viable but highly prestigious, involving two Municipal Secretaries, two federal government Departments, two federations of Terreiros de Candomblé (FENACAB and ACBANTU) and the Federal University’s Centre of Oriental and African Studies. It is the project itself that gives us the clue: it is a part of the ‘Programme for the Valorization of the Afro-Brazilian Heritage’. The category ‘Afro-Brazilian heritage’ could only emerge because, first, ‘culture’ became the language through which to articulate political pleas, and, second, the black and black-allied actors succeeded in translating Afro-Brazilian cultural assets and practices into consecrated heritage categories. The translation is a two-way road; however, after entering the distinguished list of cultural heritage, Afro-Brazilian practices also impose their meanings on it. Today, one has to think at least twice before answering the question ‘what is cultural heritage?’ The image of a splendid baroque church may no longer be the only, or even the first, picture to cross one’s mind any more. But maybe more important than integrating the list is changing the ways people relate to ‘cultural heritage’. The erecting of statues of Zumbi, the legendary leader of the Maroon state of Palmares, in very central public squares in Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, Brasília and Serra da Barriga, can be interpreted, at first glance, as a mere mimicry of conservative mnemonic devices. But it obviously goes beyond that, and not only because it institutes a change in the politics of representation in the public sphere, creating material, visual references that help constitute black identities and also pluralize the national identity. Those statues are invested

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with sacred meanings that provoke bodily dispositions and performative actions. The inauguration of Zumbi’s statue in Salvador, on 30 May 2008, was a real total social fact, which involved dozens of groups: Candomblé adherents, Blocos Afro, Afoxés, Capoeira groups, workers’ unions, tourists, politicians from different parties and trends, governmental agencies, NGOs and different political black movement groups: MNU, UNEGRO, CEN. Besides the conventional speeches, there was music, singing, praying, crying, laughter. The figure is not just another inert statue for pigeons to rest on (to say the least). It is Zumbi: ‘redivivo’ (alive again), as one of the spokesmen said. Like the Candomblé objects in the museum, it will never be just a representation: it is a presence that evokes ‘religious sensations’, recalling Meyer’s (2006) formulation. Further evidence of the statue’s religious efficacy can be seen in the pictures of the celebration of 20 November 2008 published in the newspapers. There was a blackout, but it did not keep people from going to the square, depositing flowers and lighting candles at the statue’s feet. These important ritual occasions enhance such gestures that, however, happen daily: one can often see flowers or people standing by the statue, in a reverent, meditative position. These are some of the ways through which black actors translate the consecrated heritage categories, devices and loci into Afro-Brazilian terms. Materiality is a well appraised feature that plays a key role in both meaning-making systems, the Afro-Brazilian and the governmental. On the other hand, intangible heritage policies are still outsiders trying to establish themselves in the normative heritage field. They can count on some favourable factors to achieve inclusion: intangible heritage policies have provided the institution with more visibility and popular appeal, reversing the very negative image of ‘patroller’ and freedom-restrictor it had in many places, especially in cities that have their city centre listed. Moreover, intangible heritage addresses a great number of people and profits from the resonance of their ‘objects’ with a popular habitus. Finally, but significantly, these Brazilian policies are drawing considerable attention from UNESCO, which has already proclaimed six Brazilian practices as part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity: Samba de Roda, Wajãpi body paintings, Yaokwa ritual, Frevo, Círio de Nazaré and Roda de Capoeira. Brazil has become a respected partner and discussant of UNESCO’s policies for intangible heritage, which has certainly brought more domestic visibility to this issue. People are starting to appropriate these new categories, which, as I’ve just said, somehow resonate with a popular habitus. However, as materiality is such a central issue, this factor cannot be left aside, even in intangible policies. The initial safeguard experiences concerning registered practices have shown that one of the people’s great concerns is the preservation of the material means that render the ‘intangible’ practices possible: pot-makers from Espirito Santo are concerned with the invasion and destruction of the river bank where they obtain the clay to make the pots; capoeiristas

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are worried about the increasing deforestation of Mata Atlântica and the consequent disappearance of biriba, the best wood used to make berimbau, which is the leading musical instrument in capoeira performances. These pleas show, as the institution is already well aware, that an abstract ‘immateriality’ does not really exist in people’s lives: as Mauss (1967 [1925]) long ago taught us, they will always need material objects and visible places not only to produce their means of subsistence, but also to make sense of their lives, to display and incorporate the values through which they live. And if such material objects cannot disappear from the real world, they cannot disappear from public policies either. Maria Paula Adinolfi obtained a BA degree in History and an MA degree in Social Anthropology from the University of São Paulo, Brazil, with a dissertation about the representations of Africa in the educational practices of two schools run by black institutions in Bahia, Brazil. She was a Museum Education Coordinator at the Afro-Brazilian Museum/Federal University of Bahia and a lecturer at the Department of History at the State University of Bahia. She has worked at the National Historical and Artistic Heritage Institute (IPHAN), Brazil, since 2006, where she coordinates projects for the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage. Her PhD research at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam focuses on the processes of patrimonialization of Afro-Brazilian religion and culture in two states of Brazil where African heritage plays a major role in identity formation – Bahia and Alagoas. It intends to look more closely at the official declaration of terreiros de Candomblé as heritage sites and at the formation and exhibition of collections of Candomblé objects in different kinds of museums.

Notes  1. The cannibalistic trope became an important reference in the Brazilian arts, and has been picked up time and again by Brazilian artists and intellectuals.   2. The initial phase of IPHAN, in the 1930s and 40s, was so-called because there was a strong sense of accomplishing a ‘rescue’ mission and ‘saving’ cultural heritage that was about to be irremediably lost. There was an agonistic and urgent tune in IPHAN’s documents during that period, especially when referring to the eighteenthcentury baroque cities of Minas Gerais, as shown by Fonseca (2005) and Gonçalves (1996). The latter referred to a ‘rhetoric of loss’.  3. The creation of IPHAN was also part of the process of bureaucratization of the Brazilian state, and all its actions of designation and safeguarding of cultural heritage have been invested with jargon, procedures, norms and expertise drawn from the legal field. The proceedings of designation of cultural heritage (‘processos de tombamento’, as they are referred to in this chapter) have the status of administrative legal procedures, which require a ‘technical’ report on the cultural value of the concerned cultural asset, besides many other documents that prove the identity of its owner and testify to its ownership, in case the designated asset is private property. The tombamento, in this sense, is one of the first acts to guarantee collective rights in Brazil, insofar as it implies a restriction to individual property rights: a building or

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artwork designated as cultural heritage cannot be destroyed, damaged, modified or in any way disqualified, and can only leave the country under certain regulations, according to Decree 25 (30 November, 1937).  4. For a discussion on the birth and meaning of African/Afro-Brazilian meta-ethnic categories, see Parés (2006) and below.   5. Process number 0277-T, September 25, 1941. Localized at Arquivo Noronha Santos/ IPHAN, Rio de Janeiro.  6. There are four books in which the designated assets are inscribed, which represent the categories used to classify them: Fine Arts Book (Livro de Belas Artes), Historical Book (Livro Historico), Archaeological, Ethnographic and Landscape Book (Livro Arqueologico, Etnografico e Paisagistico) and Applied Arts Book (Livro das Artes Aplicadas). The first contains those considered as the most valuable assets. The Historical, which contains references to ‘official’ historiographic accounts, includes objects and places connected to the ‘great characters’ and ‘great happenings’ in national history, in a very positivist fashion. It is also regarded as important, although it was little used in the ‘heroic phase’ – that is, until the 1960s. The Ethnographic Book only started to be relevant from the late 1970s onwards, and Applied Arts was a category practically dead at birth: only four assets were ever inscribed in it.  7. Process number 0122-T-38, June 17, 1938. Localized at Arquivo Noronha Santos/ IPHAN, Rio de Janeiro.  8. In Brazil, the Civil Police is the police department that carries out detective work, forensics and criminal investigation, while the Military Police is in charge of preventive police duties.  9. Candomblé cultic objects include garments, clothes, beads, divination implements and sacred material symbols of each divinity called ‘ferramentas de orixás’, whose shape and material relate to aspects of each divinity’s myths and main attributes. These objects are either produced in the same terreiro or bought from specialized makers, and to be put into use they undergo ritual consecration procedures. 10. Maroon communities is a general designation for social groups formed by runaway slaves in the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. In Brazil, these societies were called quilombos. 11. Ilê Aiyê was the first bloco afro, a carnival group responsible for the so-called reafricanization of the carnival in Bahia, and also one of the most important institutions of the black movement in Brazil. 12. Processo 1064-T-82. Arquivo da 7a. SR do IPHAN/Bahia. 13. Different points of view regarding the significance of the ethnographies in this process can be found in the debate between Serra (1995) and Dantas (1988), which was also commented on by Van de Port (2005: 21). 14. It is not only the black movement and the Bahian state that have claimed Candomblé as a source of authentication, but also other social actors, including the ecological and the gay movements, as shown by Mattijs van de Port (2005). 15. On the ‘war’ between Candomblé and Neo-Pentecostal churches in Brazil, see Silva (2007). For this topic specifically in Bahia, see Reinhardt (2006). See also Reinhardt, this volume.

References Adinolfi, M.P. 2005. ‘“A África é Aqui”: Representações da África em Experiências Educacionais Contra-hegemônicas na Bahia’, Master’s thesis. Universidade de Sao Paulo, Department of Anthropology. Agier, M. 2000. Anthropologie du Carnaval: La Ville, la Fête et l’Afrique à Bahia. Marseille: Éditions Parenthèses.

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Amorim, S. 2007. 1912 – O Quebra do Xangô. Documentary film. (Alagoas, 52 min). Co-produced by Staff Áudio e Vídeo/ IZP/ Secretaria de Estado da Cultura de Alagoas. Arruti, J.M. 2006. Mocambo: Antropologia e Historia do Processo de Formação Quilombola. Bauru: Edusc. Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cavalcanti, L. (ed.). 2000. Modernistas na Repartição. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. UFRJ/MinC-IPHAN. Chagas, M. 2006. Há uma Gota de Sangue em Cada Museu: A ótica Museológica de Mário de Andrade. Chapecó: Argos. Chidester, D. 2005. Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Chuva, M. 2003. ‘Fundando a Nação: A Representação de um Brasil Barroco, Moderno e Civilizado’, Topoi 4(7): 313–33. Clifford, J. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Correa, A. 2007. ‘O Museu de Magia Negra no Imaginario Social Brasileiro do Começo do Seculo XX’, paper presented at the XIII Brazilian Congress of Sociology (XIII Congresso Brasileiro de Sociologia). Recife, 29 May to 1 June, 2007. ———. 2008. ‘O Museu Mefistofelico e a Distribuição da Magia: Uma Analise do Tombamento do Primeiro Patrimonio Etnografico do Brasil (1938): A Coleção de Magia Negra do Rio de Janeiro’, paper presented at the 26th Meeting of the Brazilian Anthropological Association (26a Reunião da ABA). Porto Seguro, 1 July to 4 July, 2008. Dantas, B. 1988. Vovó Nagô e Papai Branco: Usos e Abusos da África no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Graal. Duarte, A. 1974. Catalogo Ilustrado da Coleção Perseverança. Maceio: Instituto Historico e Geografico de Alagoas. Fernandes, F. 1965. A Integração do Negro na Sociedade de Classes. São  Paulo: Cia. Editora Nacional. (English translation by Eveleth, P. 1969. The Negro in Brazilian Society. New York: Columbia University Press.) Fonseca, M.C. 2001. ‘A Invenção do Patrimônio e a Memória Nacional’, in H. Bomeny (ed.), Constelação Capanema: Intelectuais e Políticas. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Fundação Getulio Vargas; Bragança Paulista (SP): Ed. Universidade de São Francisco, pp. 85–101. ———. 2005. O Patrimônio em Processo: Trajetória da Política Federal de Preservação no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. UFRJ/Minc-IPHAN. Fry, P. 1986.  ‘Gallus Africanus Est, Ou Como Roger Bastide se Tornou Africano no Brasil’, in O. Von Simson (ed.), Revisitando a Terra de Contrastes: A Atualidade da Obra de Roger Bastide. São Paulo: FFLCH/ CERU, pp. 31–46.

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———. 1995–1996. ‘O que a Cinderela Negra tem a dizer sobre a política racial brasileira’, Revista USP 28: 122–35. Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Gilroy, P. 1992. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gonçalves, J.R. 1996. A Retorica da Perda: Os Discursos do Patrimonio Cultural no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. UFRJ/IPHAN. Guimarães, A. 2007. ‘After Racial Democracy’, trans. R. Rezende, Tempo Social 3, Special Edition. Retrieved 30 October 2017 from http://social sciences.scielo.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0103-20702 007000100002&lng=en&nrm=iso>. Hasenbalg, C. 1979. Discriminação e Desigualdades Raciais no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Graal. Ianni, O. 1966. Raças e Classes Sociais no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira. Lody, R. 2005. O Negro no Museu Brasileiro: Construindo Identidades. Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil. Mauss, M. 1967 [1925]. The Gift:  Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: The Norton Library. Meyer, B. 2006. ‘Religious Sensations: Why Media, Aesthetics and Power Matter in the Study of Contemporary Religion’, Inaugural Lecture, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. MinC/IPHAN. 2006. Patrimônio Imaterial: O Registro do Patrimônio Imaterial: Dossie Final das Atividades da Comissão e do Grupo de Trabalho Patrimônio Imaterial. Brasilia: MinC/IPHAN. Montero, P. 1998. ‘O Problema das Diferenças em um Mundo Global’, in A. Moreira (ed.). Sociedade Global: Cultura e Religião. Petrópolis: Vozes; São Paulo: EdUSF. Moura, M. 2001. ‘Carnaval e Baianidade: Arestas e Curvas na Coreografia de Identidades do Carnaval de Salvador’, PhD dissertation. Faculdade de Comunicação, UFBA. Salvador. Nascimento, A. 1978. O Genocídio do Negro Brasileiro: Processo de um Racismo Mascarado. Rio de Janeiro: Paz & Terra. (English translation by Nascimento, E. 1989. Brazil: Mixture or Massacre? Essays on the Genocide of a Black People. Dover, MA: Majority.) Parés, L.N. 2006. A Formação do Candomblé: História e Ritual da Nação Jeje na Bahia. Campinas: Editora Unicamp. Price, S. 1989. Primitive Art in Civilized Places. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ramos, A. 1940. O Negro Brasileiro. São Paulo: Editora Nacional. Reinhardt, B. 2006. ‘Espelho Ante Espelho: A Troca e a Guerra entre o Neopentecostalismo e os Cultos Afrobrasileiros em Salvador’, Master’s thesis. Universidade de Brasilia, Department of Anthropology.

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Ribeiro, Y.M. 1992. Medo do Feitiço: Relações entre Magia e Poder no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional. ———. 2005. ‘Coisas de bruxaria: As coleções de objetos de feitiçaria criadas pela dura repressão policial’, Revista de História da Biblioteca Nacional 1(6). Rodrigues, R.N. 1945. Os Africanos no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Cia. Editora Nacional. Sansone, L. 2002. ‘Da África ao Afro: Uso e Abuso da África Entre os Intelectuais e na Cultura Popular Brasileira Durante o Século XX’, AfroÁsia, Salvador: 249–69. Santos, J. 2005. O Poder da Cultura e a Cultura no Poder: A Disputa Simbólica da Herança Cultural Negra no Brasil. Salvador: Edufba. Schwarcz, L.1999. ‘Questão Racial e Etnicidade’, in S. Miceli (ed.), O Que Ler na Ciência Social Brasileira (1970–1995), Vol. 1: Antropologia. São Paulo: Sumaré/Anpocs, pp. 267–326. Serra, O. 1995. Águas do Rei. Petrópolis: Vozes. ———. 2006. ‘Sobre Psiquiatria, Candomblé e Museus’, Caderno CRH 19(47): 309–23. Silva, V.G. 2007. ‘Neopentecostalismo e Religiões Afrobrasileiras: Significados do Ataque aos Símbolos da Herança Religiosa Africana no Brasil Contemporâneo’, Mana 13(1): 207–36. Silveira, R. 2006. O Candomblé da Barroquinha: Processo de Constituição do Primeiro Terreiro Baiano de Keto. Salvador: Ed. Maianga. Van de Port, M. 2004. ‘Registers of Incontestability: The Quest for Authenticity in Academia and Beyond’, Etnofoor 17(1,2): 7–23. ———. 2005. ‘Candomblé in Pink, Green and Black: Re-scripting the AfroBrazilian Religious Heritage in the Public Sphere of Salvador, Bahia’, Social Anthropology 13(1): 1–24. Viotti da Costa, E. 1985. ‘The Myth of Racial Democracy: A Legacy of the Empire’, in The Brazilian Empire, Myths and Histories. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Vogt, C. and P. Fry. 1996. Cafundo: A Africa no Brasil, Linguagem e Sociedade. Sao Paulo: Companhia das Letras.

4 ‘Reporting the Past’

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News History and the Formation of the Sunday Times Heritage Project

Duane Jethro

To celebrate its centenary in 2006, the South African newspaper, the Sunday Times, a popular weekly broadsheet, embarked on a new kind of heritage project. The Sunday Times had a reputation for a sometimes sensational, biting reporting style that was appreciated by a cross section of the middle-class reading public.1 Having sustained readership loyalty for 100 years as one of the most widely read newspapers nationally, the Sunday Times had reason to celebrate a century of successful commercial news publication. The Sunday Times Heritage Project (STHP), as the celebration was known, primarily comprised of a series of thirty-five innovative site-specific memorials to ‘commemorate and mark news figures, events and moments that had shaped the Sunday Times Century’ (Makhanya n.d.). The project also generated an interactive website, as well as print and audiovisual media products. The project was framed as being a gesture of thanks, a tribute, to the South African public for ‘having nurtured the Sunday Times’ since its launch in 1906 (Makhanya n.d.). This was a ‘self-funded give back project’, whereby the publication intended to make a ‘100-year commitment to play a role in the heritage space’ and contribute to nation-building (Bauer 2007: 39). It was a means of taking ‘ownership of our collective experience so as to use it to forge a common South Africanness (and) ensure that our bitterness at our past is translated into positive energy’ (Makhanya n.d.). It would be distinctive in that it would use Sunday Times news history and news practices to form this new heritage venture. By celebrating its centenary through publically

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commemorating particular ‘newsworthy’ narratives, the Sunday Times aimed to ‘shine a light on … singular moment(s) in 100 years of news time which, subtly or significantly, helped to shape the diverse “us”’ (Bauer 2007: 39). As an innovative philanthropic heritage formation, therefore, the STHP was meant to reciprocate the commercial and civic bond signalled by its slogan: ‘the paper for the people’. Repacking news history, a knowledge form implicated in the workings of the capitalist market, as a philanthropic public heritage project, the STHP presents a fascinating case of post-apartheid heritage formation. For commercial entities like large media houses, the South African past became an important cultural and political reference point in the post-apartheid dispensation, because the transition to democracy was felt to be a momentous closing of a long era of racial division and oppression. But small-scale local indigenous groups also mobilized and packaged their culture as heritage for consumption in certain instances (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). Ultimately, the state played a leading role in facilitating the mediation of the past, in the heritage sector, by implementing new heritage policies and prioritizing the creation of new post-apartheid material heritage forms, so as to create a post-apartheid heritage narrative that asserted national unity in a historical context of struggle, oppression and cultural difference. Using heritage resources to articulate a persuasive, monumental narrative of national unity also helped to shore up the state’s claim to the nation. In contrast, by working with heritage and history, commercial entities attempted to tap into the positive feelings related to the fall of apartheid and symbolically link their products and services to the positive possibilities associated with the post-apartheid future. The past became an important currency for stimulating consumption and imagining the future of post-apartheid South Africa. Examples of such uses of the past abound. South African cultural, natural and precolonial history was used to style casino and entertainment resorts as a broad framing for leisure and recreational experience (Witz, Rassool and Minkley 2001; Hall and Bombardella 2005). History was sometimes explicitly refashioned and mobilized to link products, services or brands to the symbolic power of the transition. As Eve Bertelsen showed, using a series of print advertisements in the late 1990s, corporate entities appropriated signifiers of the South African liberation struggle and rerouted ‘them to a vigorously propagated discourse of consumerism and the free market’ (1998: 222). She cites a High-Tech footwear print advertisement that uses the slogan ‘When a new nation stands on its feet’ to highlight this capitalist discursive rerouting. Emptied of their historical context, in such advertisements, she argued, the political symbols of the struggle for liberation were recoded as a ‘newly assembled currency of commodity signs’ (1998: 223). South African public history could also be employed for purposes of commercial branding. For example, in the mid 1990s, the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront in Cape Town, a luxury

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shopping complex built near the city’s harbour, attempted to intervene in its elitist brand image by approaching a group of historians working at the University of Cape Town to help change such perceptions. This resulted in a proposal to set up a series of information boards relating the social history of the harbour, including the slave trade, exploitative labour, and race and class differences. This history was effectively co-opted to add historical depth while avoiding the sharp end of the historical critique. Similarly, as Anne Mager (2006) has shown in the case of South African Breweries (currently known as SAB Miller), the second largest brewing corporation in the world, corporate entities explicitly used the discourse of heritage to position their brand on the ‘right side’ of history. Mager (2006) showed how SAB used its centenary in 1995 to build the SAB World of Beer in Johannesburg and the SAB Brewery Heritage Centre in Cape Town. These museums presented a corporate legacy that aligned with a politically correct post-apartheid historical narrative, and therefore enabled the articulation of a ‘powerful corporate capitalist narrative in the rhetorical … contestation over the desired path for the future’ (Mager 2006: 159). Corporate sponsorship could also result in ironic success, as in the case of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, an award-winning, highly successful heritage institution documenting the rise and fall of apartheid, which was built using funds generated in part through the sale of skin-lightening creams during apartheid (Thomas 2012). These examples appear to highlight a disjuncture between the ideals of heritage formation and the aspirations of commercial sponsorship. Commercially sponsored heritage interventions or evocations of heritage are viewed as dubious because they are seen as being caught in the trappings of neo-liberal capitalism, of trying to extract commercial value from the cultural representations they put on display. This portrayal, however, is a stark understatement of complex cultural and economic relationships that, as in the case of the vuvuzela, could result in persuasive materially based framings of heritage (Jethro 2014). Nevertheless, it is useful for highlighting one important way in which authenticity comes into focus as a stake central to the staging of heritage formations. Rather than signalling inherent or essential cultural value, authenticity is positioned as a stake in contestations over the legitimacy the notion of heritage conveys. Commercially sponsored heritage projects are often viewed as illegitimate and unpersuasive because their claims to present history for the public good are considered inauthentic. The STHP was distinctive in this regard because it was formed out of public news history that was shaped by the news values that made the Sunday Times popular. 2 Moreover, despite representing the newspaper’s brand, it was explicitly promoted as a philanthropy project: this was not ‘a branding exercise for the Sunday Times’, the spokesperson and project head Charlotte Bauer explained (2007: 39). Because the STHP was composed of commercially circulated news repackaged as South African

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heritage, it deftly blurred the line between heritage formation and corporate branding. In this descriptive analysis of the formation of the STHP, I show that while the project did concern updating the newspaper’s brand, it was convincing because the formation of core aesthetic elements such as the memorials and the website helped generate surplus value. The STHP generated surplus economic value by creating funding for the creative industries, cultural value by expanding the spectrum of South Africa’s public heritage narratives and civic value by promoting an accessible heritage narrative that contrasted with that advanced by the state. Emphasizing the STHP’s generative potential, I also show how the STHP mediated, negotiated and contested post-apartheid heritage formation through news history and innovative material heritage forms.

News Values The STHP was originally conceived as a series of forty memorials dedicated to newsworthy events and figures that would be erected in the four major metropolitan centres around South Africa – namely, the Western Cape, Gauteng Province, KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape. These memorials would be individually designed, small-scale art pieces that were sometimes interactive but explicitly designed to avoid the sense of monumentality associated with state-driven heritage forms like Freedom Park (see Jethro 2013). Honouring its pledge to be the ‘paper for the people’, the Sunday Times grounded the STHP’s conceptual framework in the kind of ­journalistic practices that had contributed to the paper’s commercial success. This was meant to affirm its independent, media-driven character. By so doing, the Sunday Times also implicitly advocated for an alternate view of what constituted legitimate historical knowledge for public heritage projects. They wanted to show that ‘today’s news is tomorrow’s history’ (Bauer 2007: 39). Importantly, this included unflinching coverage of the Sunday Times itself. ‘Our newspaper is not in the business of revising history’, Charlotte Bauer declared, ‘especially not to make any earlier incarnations of this newspaper look better’ (Bauer n.d.). If news history comprised a valid corpus of historical data, then journalists were best suited to develop its heritage significance. The project was therefore managed and coordinated by a team of journalists or individuals with experience in the print media. At the executive level, the project was directed by Charlotte Bauer and managed by Jacqui Gunn, while the then editor of the Sunday Times, Mondli Makhanya, was also personally involved in decision-making processes. They worked in collaboration with four female journalists who sourced, researched and proposed possible local narratives in each of the four mentioned provinces. Gillian Anstey worked in Gauteng, Shelly Said covered KwaZulu-Natal Province, Sue Valentine dealt with Cape Town, and Janette Bennett worked on the Eastern Cape leg of the project (see Marschall 2010, 2011). This group of highly experienced journalists, none

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of whom had any prior experience working on heritage projects, drew on their journalistic insight and expertise, partly developed at the Sunday Times, when developing the list of narratives to be commemorated. Narratives were selected using criteria strongly informed by the news values that had contributed to the Sunday Times’ commercial success. Generally speaking, news-values are a set of socially constructed, fluid and evolving abstract ideas about how particular events are construed as being newsworthy: the character of events that is perceived to appeal to public interest and be worth reporting on (O’Sullivan et al. 1983; Harcup and O’Neill 2001, 2009; see also Fairclough 1995). In the case of the STHP narratives, the set of stories had, firstly, to display some active, compelling element. As Charlotte Bauer explained, ‘typically newspaper stories are personality driven and action-orientated. The Sunday Times is a popular paper, so our angle on these narrative memorials is to hook the viewer by making the historic news events we are asking people to remember, worth remembering: not because we should but because we can’t resist a good story’ (2007: 39). Secondly, the compelling features of these narratives had to be linked to particular spaces in the landscape: they had to ‘mark the spot where some of the significant news events … happened’ (2007: 36). Thirdly, the narratives had to go beyond the well-established pantheon of political heroes and the ‘grand narrative’ of liberation celebrated by the state. Researchers therefore ‘set out to identify and develop a number of stories, characters and sites across the news board – eureka moments in science, the arts, sport, politics and society’ (2007: 39). These were not meant to be smooth, romantic accounts of South African history: ‘the Sunday Times Heritage Project is not about role models’ (Bauer 2007: 36). This implied that the paper wished to expose the power of human agency at the centre of the events they hoped to document, ‘whether they are fearless, flawed, heroic or badly behaved – or a mixture of the above’ (Bauer 2007: 39). By underpinning the STHP in news values that had sustained the Sunday Times, officials therefore argued that they did not merely seek to extend the publication’s brand into South Africa’s landscape of memory. They also wished to pay homage to the ideals of independent journalism as playing a civic role in making knowledge public. As Charlotte Bauer put it, ‘as journalists it is our democratic right to publish what we like in our newspaper each Sunday. But it is our privilege to build memorials on the streets of South Africa’ (2007: 40).

News History The Sunday Times based its claim to be the paper for the people on a sustained legacy of dominant sales figures and a consistently biting populist editorial tone instituted at its launch on the 4 February 1906, by the cavalier adventurer and editor George Herbert Kingswell (see Austen Family n.d.). Then editor of the Rand Daily Mail, Kingswell cottoned on to the

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idea of introducing a new Sunday weekly as a riposte to the drubbing the paper was receiving at the hands of its competitors. Persuading the Mail’s owner, Sir Abe Bailey, of the viability of the venture, Kingswell solicited the necessary start-up capital and commandeered the Mail’s resources to churn out the publication. The inaugural edition marked the paper’s bold and biting stance towards mine-owning Randlords and politicians, likening the latter to be ‘reptiles that crawl out from under stones’. ‘Imperialist to the backbone’, the publication maintained that it would, however, be ‘tied to the heels of no political party’ and would steer an ‘independent political course’ (Hachten and Giffard 1984: 39; Dreyer 2006: 2–4). This was a time in South Africa when ‘English newspapers were heavily influenced by British journalistic tradition’, and where the predominant concern amongst British editors was ‘the perpetuation of British influence in a most conservative form’ at the expense of acknowledging ‘that there were grievous social injustices to be righted’ (Hachten and Giffard 1984: 39–40). At a time when the purchase and reading of newspapers on Sundays was frowned upon, the paper quickly established itself as a firm feature in the white leisure culture of Sunday media consumption, the dynamics of which were alluded to in an editorial of 1907: ‘As he took his Sunday Times with his early coffee in bed (as every decent man should), the reader rubbed his eyes and became wide awake on the instant … of reading about some sensational piece of news’ (cited in Dreyer 2006: 4). By the time the paper celebrated its centenary in 2006, however, it had a much broader readership profile.3 Journalist researchers went beyond using the Sunday Times news archive as a primary source of historical information. Yet, an implicit criteria for the commemorative STHP narratives was that they had to have been covered by the Sunday Times at some point (Bauer n.d.). Taking into account the narratives’ connection to this body of news history, the socio-political circumstances under which this knowledge was generated warrants some critical attention. Despite the populist, critical editorial line it took when it was launched, the Sunday Times reinforced the views of a white, English-speaking minority. It was also unashamedly racist. Early issues of the paper therefore offered a ‘fascinating, if sometimes alarming glimpse into prevailing popular opinion, at least amongst its overwhelmingly white readership’ (Dreyer 2006: 5). The Sunday Times, like its English-language competitors at the time, would continue to cater almost exclusively to the desires and sentiments of this readership through the early apartheid era, although the flagrant racism that had soiled its copy during its early days would, over time, be redacted. This shift was related to a growing perception, emerging from the late 1950s onwards, that newspapers like the Sunday Times ‘lead the assault on racism and injustices of the political and economic establishment’ under circumstances of increasing state repression (Hachten and Giffard 1984: 140; see Hepple 1960, 1974). Situated between the conservative Afrikaans press and the state, from the 1960s onwards, the English- speaking press was able to

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forge a lucrative commercial niche for itself by claiming to be the liberal voice of a white minority expressing well-intended critique on behalf of a silent and oppressed black majority (Chimutengwende 1978). The STHP was therefore also about reframing the paper in the history of print media production in twentieth century South Africa. In some senses, then, the slogan that the Sunday Times was the ‘paper for the people’, as Charlotte Bauer put it, could also be construed as a catchy slogan that ‘depended on who the people were at the time’ (Bauer 2007).

Memorable Markers Thinking through an aesthetic means of materially impressing the project into South Africa’s heritage landscape, members of the STHP executive team were particularly inspired by memorial projects in Europe. One source of inspiration came from the ‘blue plaques that peppered the streets

Figure 4.1  Memory sign, Places of Remembrance, by Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, Bayerisches Viertel, Schöneberg, Berlin. Photo by the author.

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of London’ (Bauer 2007: 36). Started in 1866, and run by the Royal Society of Arts and the London City Council, the Blue Plaque Scheme ‘is believed to be the oldest of its kind in the world, commemorating notable figures of the past and the buildings in which they lived’ through the erection of plaques at these sometimes-forgotten residences (English Heritage n.d.). The other source of inspiration came from ‘the engrossing memory signs found on the streets of Schöneberg, Berlin’, in the Bayerisches Viertel (Bauer 2007: 36). Commissioned by the Berlin Senate, the memory signs were a public memory project honouring the legacy of the suburb’s pre-war Jewish community. Post-war reconstruction and restoration had virtually erased the traces of its former Jewish residents, who included Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt. The Senate initiated a memorial competition to attend to this lacuna. The conceptual artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock lodged a novel proposal entitled ‘Places of Remembrance’. Instead of a grand, centrally located and spatially disconnected memorial, the artists proposed an expanded, diffuse and locative concept consisting of a series of innocuous signs featuring playful popular images, such as bathing suits, hopscotch, dogs and dummies throughout the area, coupled with repressive Nazi era legislation on the reverse (Dubow 2004: 365–74). Similar to the Stolpersteine project (see Harjes 2005; Cook and Riemsdijk 2014), this was an explicitly subversive approach to the traditional concept of a Denkmal, or monument, that was intended to interrupt the commemorative codes associated with monuments in Berlin. Seemingly innocent yet still unsettling, ‘Places of Remembrance’ made an almost immediate impact; firstly on anxious local residents unaware of their purpose, and then school students, for whom an educational programme was developed using the memorials (see Wiedmer 1995; Wiedmer 1999: 103–15; Koss 2004; Till 2005: 155–60; Stih and Schnock 2005: 4–9; Rosenberg 2012). Troubling the ‘conspicuously inconspicuous’ (see Musil 1987: 61–64) nature of conventional public commemorations, as a low-key, expansive yet evocative heritage form, the Schöneberg memory signs were seen as an appropriate template for public commemoration in South Africa. Inspired by this creative intervention, the Sunday Times decided to memorialize their newsmakers with pieces of public art. Since the team were ‘heritage virgins’, or novices in the field of public commemorations, officials enlisted the services of the arts management company Art at Work to facilitate the materialization of the memorials. Run by Lesley Perkes and Monna Mokoena, two well-known arts management practitioners, Art at Work was a small but well-established company that specialized in ‘integrating arts into neighbourhood and district development, urban regeneration and architecture’. As ‘an experienced large-scale arts management company’, Art at Work’s core business was ‘offering knowledge and specialist services across arts disciplines’ to clients involved in projects that entailed ‘long-term regeneration, neighbourhood/precinct/property development, district management and sustained or large-scale arts

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projects’ (Art at Work n.d.). Managing this interface between the arts and developmental needs, Art at Work offered a range of services that enabled it to ensure the realization of such ventures, boasting a track record spanning performance and public art for the Newtown Improvement District in Johannesburg, the Johannesburg Property Company and the Johannesburg Development Agency. Art at Work’s brief for the STHP resonated with many of the key concepts running through the London Blue Plaques and the Schöneberg Memory project. The memorials had to be site-specific, erected on the spot or in the immediate vicinity of where the narrative being commemorated had transpired. Each would be distinctive and designed by a different artist. They had to avoid ‘anything remotely monumental or intimidating’, and develop concepts that were subtle and subdued, and which would blend easily into the surrounding urban environment as functional, even interactive, pieces of public art (Perkes and Mokoena n.d.). Finally, they had to be durable and enduring, ‘as time-proof, people-proof, and weather-proof as possible’ (Bauer 2007: 40). All of the memorials would eventually be embossed with a plaque explaining the narrative in roughly 100 words and include a link guiding visitors to the STHP website. The calculated set of choices permeating the concept suggest that these pieces of commemorative work were designed to break away from the dominant model of postapartheid heritage formation characterized by the motif of the ‘big man on a bronze horse’.

Figure 4.2  Brenda Fassie Memorial, Bassline Studios, Newtown, Johannesburg. Photo by the author.

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Careful planning and preparation came to fruition on the 9 March 2006, when the project was officially launched at Bassline Studios, in Newtown, Johannesburg. The Sunday Times arranged a glamorous event to celebrate its centenary, with the unveiling of the project’s flagship memorial dedicated to the celebrity singer Brenda Fassie. Gathered outside Bassline Studios, a nightclub and recording studio, in Newtown, Johannesburg, on this warm autumn evening were the Heritage Project team, some of the artists, public officials and representatives from various communities of interest (Davie 2006). Brenda Fassie was a controversial yet captivating pop songstress who had passed away tragically two years prior on 9 May 2004. Amos Masondo, the mayoral incumbent at the time, described her as ‘the woman who managed to combine ground breaking musical success with accessibility and humanness that (continued) to draw a fierce loyalty and protectiveness from her fans’ (Davie 2006). ‘A stellar newsmaker and the embodiment of the nation’s musical and social history’ (Bauer 2007: 36), Fassie was honoured with a life-sized bronze statue erected at the entrance to the Bassline Studios where she had been a successful draw for many years. Designed by Angus Taylor, a well-established local sculptor with a preference for realism, the bronze rendition of Fassie was realistic yet multilayered. Finely etched with quotes from some of her most famous songs and speeches, the memorial depicted the vivacious artist seated invitingly on a high stool before a microphone, with another vacant stool beside her calling pedestrians to have a seat, share the mike and take a photo with MaBrrr as she was commonly known (Taylor n.d.; Anstey n.d.). This was an unconventional emblem for a post-apartheid heritage project. Firmly in the limelight for her musical talent as much as her turbulent personal life, as a symbol of the feisty, unbridled young, black urban creative energy of the late twentieth century, Fassie was a counter-intuitive choice for public commemoration: a flawed female public figure renowned for her impact on the popular consciousness. The medium through which she was commemorated, a bronze life-like sculpture, added to the memorial’s subversive, counter-cultural character, since such bronze sculptures were often associated with the foisting of ‘great’ masculinities into the public sphere.4 The memorial therefore captured and expressed the evocative, small-scale, site-specific, alternative public aesthetic of the STHP project. Raising Brenda Fassie’s profile through this act of memorializing was intended to double as a dedication for the series of memorials erected around Johannesburg. This included, for example, the artist Usha Seejarim’s memorial ‘honouring Mohandas Ghandi and the 1908 protest against racism’, which featured a potje (traditional cooking pot) similar to the one used at the protest wherein protesters incinerated their racist government passes. Seejarim’s memorial reignited that moment in history through a zoetrope that ‘enabled viewers to see an image of a pass actually burning’ when they turned a wheel located underneath the cooking pot, in the sprawling black township of Soweto,

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just outside Johannesburg (Sunday Times Heritage Project n.d. (a)). A number of other memorials were also installed in Soweto, including an oversized commemorative photo mounted outside the home of the founder of the famous football club Orlando Pirates; a sculpture in the shape of a book just opposite Morris Isaacson High School, where the 1976 student riots first broke out; and a sculpture of a sewing machine outside the home of ANC activist Lilian Ngoyi, who took up handiwork during a long period of house arrest during apartheid. From the township to the inner city, spanning topics from politics to sports and popular culture, the STHP was a diffuse, alternate memorial complex that celebrated a spectrum of ordinary histories in place. That is not to say the memorials were universally well received or uncontested. Designed with the best intentions, standing idle, isolated and neglected, many of the memorials did not effectively perform the kind of public work they were meant to do. As I show elsewhere (Jethro 2017), many of the memorials were ruined, whether through neglect or active acts of vandalism, and their ruination highlighted a subcultural narrative concerning the ways the artistic memorials interfaced with very local politics of publicness and public histories.

Corporate Connections Posing proudly with the effigy of Brenda Fassie at the launch, the Sunday Times editor, Mondli Makhanya, took the opportunity to promote the STHP and praise the partners who had played a role in its success. He proposed a vote of thanks to ‘Councillor Amos Masondo and his team (from the Johannesburg City Council) for their support, Business Arts South Africa, as well as the heritage community. And the artists – they have done an amazing job’ (Davie 2006). Celebrating the centenary of a popular publication, the launch of the Brenda Fassie memorial at Bassline Studios, and the Johannesburg leg of the STHP, the Sunday Times editor’s remarks highlighted the collective effort that went into materializing the project. Indeed, as I will go on to show, the STHP was the product of shared creative labour involving many stakeholders. The Sunday Times had to forge a range of strategic partnerships with influential companies, institutions and civic organizations to get the STHP off the ground and later to elaborate its reach. Besides the Johannesburg municipality, another important partner was Business and Arts South Africa (BASA), an organization that worked to ‘ensure the relevance and the sustainability of the arts in South Africa by providing expertise in developing partnerships between business and the arts’ (Business & Arts South Africa n.d.). BASA would supply funding for the polished, black plaques of the Johannesburg leg of the project, and have its logo featured on the plaques of all the STHP memorials.5 The Sunday Times also contacted Atlantic Philanthropies, a multinational funding organization, to

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broker its largest partnership to secure additional funding for the project.6 The Sunday Times had invested the sum of R5 million into the STHP, specifically dedicated to the erection of the memorials, but seeing its potential as a historical archive, hoped to secure funding to develop and broadcast this information (Segal and Mokwena 2006). To this end, a proposal was formulated as the basis of ‘a collaboration’ between the Sunday Times and the Atlantic Philanthropies (Segal and Mokwena 2006). The proposal document is revealing, showing the kinds of corporate associations the Sunday Times Heritage Project could empower. Lauren Segal and Steve Kwena Mokwena, two independent professionals working in South Africa’s growing public communications, media and heritage sector, were contracted to write the proposal. Their professional biographies reveal their expertise in developing large-scale heritage projects in South Africa. Steve Kwena Mokwena was a social historian, communication strategist and film producer who had experience working as a curator at the site of the Old Fort Prison at Constitution Hill, a post-apartheid heritage complex housing South Africa’s Constitutional Court.7 Holding a Masters in Media Studies from the University of London, Lauren Segal specialized in the ‘research and development of communication strategies for large multi-media projects and campaigns’ on projects that often had some form of cultural-historical bent.8 As the authors of this funding proposal, Segal and Mokwena were acting in the employ of the Trace Group, a small, independent multimedia consultancy firm run by ‘a team of professionals in the field of heritage, research, exhibition and design’. Trace Group marketed itself as ‘specialists in extracting the stories hidden beneath the surface of South Africa and bringing them to life’.9 Formulated to establish a relationship between the Sunday Times and Atlantic Philanthropies, the proposal for a collaboration around the STHP helped established a professional relationship between the Sunday Times and a private heritage specialist even before any further funding was granted. The proposal spelled out the nature of the collaboration between the two entities, asking pointedly, ‘how can Atlantic Philanthropies make a meaningful contribution in the heritage sector by leveraging off the Sunday Times heritage project?’, and how can the collaboration ‘ensure that public memory and memorialization can contribute towards reconciliation and nation-building’ (Segal and Mokwena 2006: 2). Underlying the question was the aim of using ‘the rich material from our past to shape the foundations of our common future and to advance Atlantic Philanthropies core mandate around reconciliation and human rights’. It was proposed that these aims would be advanced through knowledge production and disseminated using the STHP archival material. The funds for which the Sunday Times was applying would therefore be spread across three research areas, ‘reaching a mass audience’, ‘building a knowledge resource for the heritage sector’, and ‘creating opportunities

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for advocacy and community involvement’ (Segal and Mokwena 2006: 3). The responsibility for curating and disseminating this knowledge would be ceded to the South African History Archive (SAHA), with oversight  and expertise provided by ‘Historical Papers (at the University of the Witwatersrand), the (Wits University) History Workshop and the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation’ (Segal and Mokwena 2006: 4). These partner organizations were based at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and worked to advance the liberation of factual historical knowledge for wider consumption, a research agenda that matched the ideals to which the Sunday Times aspired. ‘Established in the 1980s’, SAHA’s ‘founding principle was to promote the recapturing of our lost and neglected history and record history in the making’ (Pigou n.d.). This entailed ‘documenting the struggles against apartheid and the making of democracy’ (Pigou n.d.). The Wits History Workshop was established in the late 1970s by a group of scholars including Phillip Bonner, Noor Nieftagodien and Lulli Callinicos, who worked to advance a Neo-Marxist approach to South African history that focused on class struggle, developing a body of writing that would come to be known as ‘people’s histories’ or ‘histories from below’ (see Saunders 1991; Bonner 1994). Cynthia Kros, a member of the Wits History Workshop collective, was an active participant in the conceptualization of the STHP, and published an academic article interrogating her personal experience of working on the project through the question of the place of public history, and the idea of the public historian, in post-apartheid South Africa (Kros 2008). Enlisting the services of these established academic and non-governmental institutions was meant to facilitate the generation of ‘excitement and public interest in the past’, ‘ensure public participation’ and help build ‘a knowledge resource (that would) deepen the knowledge base around heritage practise in South Africa’ (Segal and Mokwena 2006: 3). A number of urgent priority projects were described as key outcomes. This included a series of radio inserts, archiving of content and information related to the STHP narratives, extending the Heritage Project website, the publication of a commemorative book and a school oral history campaign. SAHA was responsible for the implementation of these sub-projects. The appeal for funding showed that the Sunday Times wished to greatly expand the STHP. It also demonstrated that the Sunday Times was able to use the STHP to broker relationships that would facilitate the generation of funds for the public dissemination of historical knowledge. Moreover, the Sunday Times was able to use the STHP to structure a network of relationships between itself and established civic and academic institutions in a way that not only helped elaborate the project but also gave it a stronger sense of legitimacy. Reinforced with knowledge and expertise curated by history and heritage professionals, the STHP inherited a sense of authenticity, or legitimacy as a public heritage project.10

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Newseum The Sunday Times eventually secured the funds it had applied for.11 Celebrating the announcement, Lauren Segal explained, this collaboration would see the liberation of the archive, bringing information previously cordoned off ‘in dusty archives in the basement of libraries and museums’ out into the open for public access. Citing the liberation of knowledge stored in inaccessible repositories, Segal’s comment spoke to important South African scholarly work addressing the social significance of archives such as those generated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (see Hamilton 2002). Asserting their positive role in facilitating archival access, Lauren Segal went on to explain that their collaboration was ‘about helping all South Africans connect with their history by liberating historical treasures and making them accessible via the most effective technology available today’. Immediacy, entertainment and accessibility became the terms framing the project’s claim to a strong sense of authenticity – that is, the idea of public recognition of the legitimacy of the project. Segal elaborated that the archive would be liberated through transforming historical knowledge into rich, easily consumed multimedia products such as a website, 3-D imaging, radio inserts and CD ROMs. ‘By engaging with stories of the past in these new ways’ audiences would ‘have an opportunity

Figure 4.3  Collage of books and media products produced by the Sunday Times Heritage Project. Great Lives Pivotal Moments, Lauren Segal and Paul Holden. Jacana Media 2007; A Century of Sundays: 100 Years of Breaking News in the Sunday Times. © Zebra Press, Penguin Random House South Africa; Remembering a Darker Time: John Vorster Square. Courtesy of the South African History Archive.

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to explore aspects of our history in ways that have not been possible before’ (Segal n.d.). Celebrating the partnership, Segal highlighted the high-tech mediation of new heritage projects in post-apartheid South Africa as a means of framing their claims to cultural legitimacy. The presentation of archives in the online digital space, art historian Sabine Marschall (2013) argues, can be construed as a new form of ‘vernacular memory practice’ in South Africa, different from precolonial indigenous and colonial institutionalized sites of memory, in the ways that it democratizes the negotiation of memory of the past. Through this collaboration, which would spawn a host of entertaining, accessible, informative and historical media products, the Sunday Times could be seen to be helping to create and sustain a democracy of knowledge about South African cultural history and heritage as framed by its news century. SAHA took on the responsibility of managing the STHP archive in full knowledge of the gravity of its custodial duties. Archives, they explained, ‘never provided a full account of the past’, and were best interpreted as offering a fragmentary account of historical events. These interpretations of the past, furthermore, were ‘greatly influenced by what records are preserved and presented, processes influenced by power relations in society’. Critically, they highlighted how engaging with archives and archival knowledge had an important role to play in advancing democratic values (see Mangcu 2011). ‘South Africa’s transition ha(d) provided an unprecedented opportunity to reassess what records we have and how they were used – an opportunity to reconceptualise and to refigure the archive’. SAHA wished to advance the critical work archives were able to do in post-apartheid South Africa by creating access to assemblages of historical information in new and innovative ways. SAHA’s management, curation and dissemination of the STHP archive was ‘an important part of making the archive accessible beyond a traditional user base of researchers and academics, to an increasing number of South Africans who were entering the digital age’ (Sunday Times Heritage Project n.d. (b)). SAHA was crucially involved in developing and expanding the official STHP website. Digital access had formed a major part of the long-term plans of the STHP. This means of ‘exhibiting’ information was significant, as it highlighted a growing international trend regarding the display of cultural heritage material on the World Wide Web (see Parry 2007; Kalay, Kvan and Affleck 2009). Through the collaboration with SAHA the Sunday Times had hoped to launch a new website, updated with deep, rich background information and captivating images to supplement the memorial narratives, in an effort to ‘create a lasting online legacy’. As Chris Deeks, a senior manager explained, the website would become ‘a rich and memorable historical resource’ for local and foreign online visitors. This ‘museum of news’ would ‘remain visible to the public through the Sunday Times website long after the print coverage subside(d)’, enduring as an ‘online multimedia heritage resource that (would) reflect our nation’s colourful

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Figure 4.4  Screenshot by the author, Sunday Times Heritage Project Website.

history and promote our national identity’.12 This ‘online multimedia heritage resource’ coalesced corporate, scholarly and non-governmental interests about markets, history and national identity. It was in the flashy audiovisual environment housed on the World Wide Web where the Sunday Times’ claim about the authenticity appeared to be visually affirmed. Branded as a celebration of the Sunday Times centenary, featuring a headline image of Mondli Makhanya seated on the Sunday Times commemorative bench outside the paper’s head office, the new website was a masterpiece of audiovisual workmanship. Packed into its slick interface was a treasure trove of information about the history of the project, the

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memorials and their wider social, cultural and historical significance. Launched on the 24 September 2007, Heritage Day, the new website’s accessible and visually appealing design was meant to appeal to the taste of South African high-school learners.13 The layout of the site was intended to make learning about the past stimulating and enjoyable. The home page provided information on the history of the project and the intentions of its creators. Clicking on a link to one of the memorials led one to a colourful visual account of the narrative, with supplementary historical information, audio and video archives, and a panoramic photo of the actual memorial in place. Further embellishing these dedicated pages was information about the artist, background on the creative process that informed the final concept and a link to relevant archival material that had been gathered, all arranged and uploaded by SAHA. This was not a ‘newseum’ but a lively interactive pedagogical tool for the online instruction of learners about news, the arts and post-apartheid heritage. The development of such a pedagogical tool entailed revolutionary forward thinking, since, at the time, many of the learners with whom the SAHA hoped to engage were hamstrung by a lack of access to computers and bandwidth to be able to access the site. The website did, however, fulfil the organizations’ aspirations of creating a stimulating, publically accessible pedagogical tool based on the Sunday Times century of news. As such they contributed to the cultivation of a critical citizenship by stimulating curiosity about the past through making historical knowledge appealing and by portraying an alternate version of the South African past different from the state’s dominant, nationalist heritage narrative articulated through museums and monuments.

Conclusion Analysis of the STHP has shown that it was neither an exclusively philanthropic expression of the Sunday Times claimed identity as ‘the paper for the people’, nor an entirely cynical exercise in rebranding and marketing. Certainly, the project helped expand the Sunday Times’ brand presence and reposition its public profile to align with the values of the post-apartheid dispensation. The Sunday Times certainly benefited, at least in brand value. But as I have also shown, so did many stakeholders, especially the South African public. The project was meaningful, regardless of the Sunday Times’ claims of altruism, in so far as it created value. Specifically, I have shown that the STHP created cultural value, economic value and civic value. Firstly, the Sunday Times created cultural value by actively developing a set of historical narratives that were outside the mainstream of public history, and commemorated these stories through a series of novel, innovative pieces of public art, an interactive website and other media products. By creating cultural value, the Sunday Times was able to also generate economic value, by which I mean it helped generate

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a capital income to fund the crucial research and creative work of the stakeholders who partnered in the project. Finally, in this way, the Sunday Times also created civic value by promoting freedom of information about the South African past that stood in opposition to the singular heritage narrative authorized by the state, and therefore facilitated conditions for the flourishing of a critical, questioning post-apartheid citizenship. Duane Jethro is a 2017 Alexander von Humboldt Post-Doctoral Fellow based at the Centre for Anthropological Research for Museums and Heritage, CARMAH, at the Humboldt University, Berlin. His postdoctoral project, ‘Aesthetics and Difference’, looks at the work of commemorations under changing social and temporal conditions in Berlin. He is a graduate of the University of Utrecht. His thesis, ‘Aesthetics of Power: Heritage Formation and the Senses in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, looked at relationships between heritage, materiality, aesthetics and the senses. He has published in Material Religion, African Diaspora and Tourist Studies.

Notes The research for this chapter has been developed in the framework of and funded by the NWO funded research project ‘Heritage Dynamics: Politics of Authentication and Aesthetics of Persuasion in Brazil, Ghana, South Africa and the Netherlands’. I am grateful to Birgit Meyer and Mattijs van de Port for their incisive comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.   1. Media survey data indicated that it was the leading Sunday publication, with a readership that was predominantly black and between the Living Standards Measure (LSM) categories of 6 and 10. LSM categories ranked consumers from 0 to 10 according to household income data, with middle and upper classes roughly ranked from 6 and 7 upwards. See http://www.tvsa.co.za/default.asp?blogname=news&arti cleID=4931 for a full explanation of the LSM standards.   2. For this reason it has attracted scholarly attention, which so far has focused on questions of archive (Josias 2013), public history and heritage (Kros 2008), gender and memorialization (Marschall 2010) and heritage and practices of mediation (Marschall 2011).   3. While fraught, loaded and contested, race and racial language still has wide currency in South Africa for measuring and implementing policies of social and economic redress.   4. Indeed, the monument was inspired by ‘José Villa Soberon’s bronzes of John Lennon on a park bench and Ernest Hemingway propping up a bar – both in Havana’ (Bauer n.d.).   5. Personal interview with Charlotte Bauer, 16 January 2010.   6. Atlantic Philanthropies distributed grants to the value of $5.5 billion dollars by the end of 2011 through their Ageing, Children and Youth, Population Health and Reconciliation and Human Rights programmes in regions spanning the United States of America, Vietnam, Australia, Bermuda, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and South Africa (Atlantic Philanthropies n.d.),   7. He had also worked as a researcher in the Department of Arts and Culture’s Cultural Heritage and Legacy Project, which included the monumental Freedom Park in

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Pretoria. For his professional biography, see http://www.africanfilmny.org/2013/ste ve-kwena-mokwena/ (accessed 4 January 2018).   8. Lauren Segal was integrally involved in the curating of Constitutional Hill, developing the visitor experience of the Old Prison. She had also curated a series of images of former president Nelson Mandela for the Nelson Mandela Foundation, and has authored or co-authored a number of accessible, colourful, non-fiction history texts as promotional material for some of these projects, including Number Four: the Making of Constitution Hill (2005), Mapping Memory: Former Prisoners Tell Their Stories (2006) and One Law, One Nation: The Making of the South African Constitution (2011). (‘The team’ http://www.tracegroup.co.za/?id=team (accessed 1 May 2012).   9. They boasted a portfolio of work spanning Constitution Hill, the Kliptown Heritage Framework and the Workers Museum for the Johannesburg Development Agency. In the coming years, the Trace Group would provide a range of specialized services for the expansion of the STHP. See http://www.tracegroup.co.za/?id=past (accessed 1 May 2012). 10. The public’s perception of the claims the Sunday Times made about its project are central to the debate about authenticity. This chapter cannot accommodate this important aspect of the debate but rather focuses on how the newspaper staged and framed claims about its heritage project. 11. Atlantic Philanthropies annual report issued in April of 2006 declared that a grant for the sum of R5, 016, 300 had been issued to SAHA, with the purpose of ‘supporting collaboration with the Sunday Times Heritage Project to communicate and disseminate information about past human rights abuses and anti-apartheid struggles, as a contribution to the discourse about reconciliation’ (Atlantic Philanthropies 2006: 93). 12. In digitizing and displaying information online, SAHA often worked in collaboration with other non-governmental institutions like Digital Innovation South Africa (DISA), based at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and Aluka.org, an ‘online digital library of scholarly resources from and about Africa’, both of whom aimed to broaden South Africa’s historical resources and increase accessibility by digitizing archives and making them available online (see http://www.aluka.org/heritage and http://www.aluka.org/struggles). 13. Learner is the official term for school pupils in South Africa.

References Anstey, G. ‘Who is Angus Taylor’, Sunday Times Heritage Project. Retrieved 31 October 2017 from http://sthp.saha.org.za/memorial/articles/who_is_ angus_taylor.htm. Art at Work. n.d. ‘Art at Work’. Retrieved 1 May 2012 from http://www. artatwork.co.za. Atlantic Philanthropies. n.d. ‘About’, Atlantic Philanthropies. Retri­eved 1 May 2012 from http://www.atlanticphilanthropies.org/about-atlantic. ———. 2006. ‘Annual Report’, Atlantic Philanthropies. Retrieved 1 May 2012 from http://www.atlanticphilanthropies.org/learning/2006-annualreport. Austen Family. n.d. ‘George Herbert Kingswell’, Austen Family. Retrieved 31 October 2017 from https://www.austenfamily.org/g-h-kingswell/. Bauer, C. n.d. ‘How it All Began’, Sunday Times Heritage Project. Retrieved 31 October 2017 from http://sthp.saha.org.za/home/how_it_all_began. htm.

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———. 2007. ‘Goodbye to Big Men on Bronze Horses: When the Sunday Times Turned 100 Last Year, It Decided not only to Celebrate, but to “Give Back” by Getting into the Heritage Business’, Rhodes Journalism Review 27 (September): 36–41. Bertelsen, E. 1998. ‘Ads and Amnesia: Black Advertising in the New South Africa’, in S. Nuttall and C. Coetzee (eds), Negotiating the Past: Making Memory in South Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 221–24. Bonner, P. 1994. ‘New Nation, New History: The History Workshop in South Africa’, The Journal of American History 81(3): 977–85. Business & Arts South Africa. n.d. ‘Mission’. Retrieved 1 May 2012 from http://www.basa.co.za/about-us/about-basa/. Chimutengwende, C. 1978. South Africa: The Press and Politics of Liberation. London: Barbican Books. Comaroff, J.L. and J. Comaroff. 2009. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cook, M. and M. Van Riemsdijk. 2014. ‘Agents of Memorialization: Gunter Demnig’s Stolpersteine and the Individual (Re-)creation of a Holocaust Landscape in Berlin’, Journal of Historical Geography 43: 138–47. Davie, L. 2006. ‘Brenda Fassie Lives on in Bronze’, Joburg News, 10 March. Retrieved 1 May 2012 from http://www.joburgnews.co.za/2006/mar/ mar10–stimesproject.stm. Dreyer, N. 2006. A Century of Sundays: 100 Years of Breaking News in the Sunday Times. Johannesburg: Zebra Press. Dubow, N. 2004. ‘On Monuments, Memorials and Memory: Some Precedents Towards a South African Option’, in E. Doxtader and C.  Villavicencio (eds), To Repair the Irreparable: Reparation and Reconstruction in South Africa. Cape Town: David Phillip, pp. 359–78. English Heritage. n.d. ‘Blue Plaques’, English Heritage. Retrieved 1 May 2012 from http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/discover/blue-plaques/. Fairclough, N. 1995. Media Discourse. London: Bloomsbury. Hachten, W. and C.A. Giffard. 1984. The Press and Apartheid: Repression and Propaganda in South Africa. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Hall, M. and P. Bombardella. 2005. ‘Las Vegas in Africa’, Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1): 5–24. Hamilton, C. et al. 2002. Refiguring the Archive. Cape Town: David Philip. Harcup, T. and D. O’Neill. 2001. ‘What is News? Galtung and Ruge Revisited’, Journalism Studies 2(2): 261–80. ———. 2009. ‘News Values and Selectivity’, in K. Wahl-Jorgensen and T. Hanitzsch (eds), The Handbook of Journalism Studies: International Communication Association Handbook Series. New York: Routledge, pp. 161–74. Harjes, K. 2005. ‘Stumbling Stones: Holocaust Memorials, National Identity, and Democratic Inclusion in Berlin’, German Politics & Society: 138–51.

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Hepple, A. 1960. Censorship and Press Control in South Africa. Published by the author: Johannesburg. ———. 1974. Press Under Apartheid. London: International Defence and Aid Fund. Jethro, D. 2013. ‘An African Story of Creation: Heritage Formation at Freedom Park Pretoria’, Material Religion 9(3): 370–93. Josias, A.P. 2013. ‘Methodologies of Engagement: Locating Archives in Post-Apartheid Memory Practises’, PhD Dissertation. University of Michigan. ———. 2014. ‘Vuvuzela Magic: The Production and Consumption of “African” Heritage During the FIFA 2010 World Cup’, African Diaspora 7(2): 177–204. ———. 2017. ‘Transgressive Touch: Ruination, Public Feeling and the Sunday Times Heritage Project’, in K. Miller and B. Schmahmann (eds), Bronze Warriors and Plastic Presidents: Public Art in South Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 166–92. Kalay, Y., T. Kvan and J. Affleck. 2009. New Heritage: New Media, New Heritage. London: Routledge. Koss, J. 2004. ‘Coming to Terms with the Present’, Grey Room 16: 116–31. Kros, C. 2008. ‘Prompting Reflections: An Account of the ‘Sunday Times’ Heritage Project from the Perspective of an Insider Historian’, Kronos 34: 159–80. Mager, A. 2006. ‘Trafficking in Liquor, Trafficking in Heritage: Beer Branding as Heritage in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, International Journal of Heritage Studies (12)2: 159–75. Makhanya, M. n.d. ‘Heritage Virgins Come of Age’, Sunday Times Heritage Project. Retrieved 31 October 2017 from http://sthp.saha.org.za/home/ heritage_virgins_come_of_age.htm. Mangcu, X. (ed.). 2011. Becoming Worthy Ancestors: Archive, Public Deliberations and Identity in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Marschall, S. 2010. ‘How to Honour a Woman: Gendered Memorialisation in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, Critical Arts 24(2): 260–83. ———. 2011. ‘The Sunday Times Heritage Project: Heritage, the Media and the Formation of National Consciousness’, Social Dynamics: Journal of African Studies 37(3): 409–23. ———. 2013. ‘The Virtual Memory Landscape: The Impact of Information Technology on Collective Memory and Commemoration in Southern Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 39(1): 193–205. Musil, R. 1987. ‘Monuments’, in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author. Hygiene, CO: Eridanos Press. O’Sullivan, T. et al. 1983. ‘News Values’, in Key Concepts in Communication, Studies in Communication. New York: Methuen, pp. 201–3. Parry, R. 2007. Recoding the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change. London: Routledge.

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Perkes, L. and M. Mokoena. n.d. ‘Public Art Meets History’s Heart’, Sunday Times Heritage Project. Retrieved 31 October 2017 from http://sthp. saha.org.za/home/public_art_meets_historys_heart.htm. Pigou, P. n.d. ‘An Archive for the People’, Sunday Times Heritage Project. Retrieved 31 October 2017 from http://sthp.saha.org.za/home/south_ african_history_archive.htm. Rosenberg, E. 2012. ‘Walking in the City: Memory and Place’, The Journal of Architecture 17(1): 131–49. Saunders, C. 1991. ‘Radical History – the Wits Workshop Version – Reviewed’, South African Historical Journal 24: 160–66. Segal, L. n.d. ‘Flying Off the Shelves’, Sunday Times Heritage Project. Retrieved 1 May 2012 from http://heritage.thetimes.co.za/article. aspx?id=570556. Segal, L. and S.K. Mokwena. 2006. ‘Recommendations for Atlantic Philanthropies on their Potential Collaboration with the Sunday Times Heritage Project’, 28 February 2006. South African History Archive Collection. Stih, R. and F. Schnock. 2005. Berlin Messages. Fort Lauderdale, TX: Museum of Art. Sunday Times Heritage Project. n.d. (a). ‘Mohandas Gandhi: The Father of Passive Resistance’. Retrieved 31 October 2017 from http://sthp.saha. org.za/memorial/mohandas_gandhi.htm. ———. n.d. (b). ‘SAHA and the Sunday Times Heritage Project’. Retrieved 31 October 2017 from http://sthp.saha.org.za/home/south_african_his tory_archive.htm. Taylor, A. n.d. ‘Angus Taylor’. Retrieved 1 May 2012 from http://www. angustaylor.co.za/. Thomas, L.M. 2012. ‘Skin Lighteners, Black Consumers and Jewish Entrepreneurs in South Africa’, History Workshop Journal 73(1): ­259–83. Till, K. 2005. The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Wiedmer, C. 1995. ‘Places of Remembrance’, Alphabet City (4+5): 6–12. ———. 1999. The Claims of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Germany and France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Witz, L., C. Rassool and G. Minkley. 2001. ‘Repackaging the Past for South African Tourism’, Daedalus 277–96.

5 Scaffolding Heritage

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Transient Architectures and Temporalizing Formations in Luanda

Ruy Llera Blanes

As the editors point out in the introduction to this volume, heritage is, more than a ‘thing’, a process of formation, in which questions of identity politics, authenticity and fabrication merge with cultural forms as well as formulations of culture. Moving beyond the typical constructivist approach towards heritage-making, which more often than not brings us to debates about the authenticity or ‘fake-ness’ of heritage, they argue for the experienced reality of cultural fabrication. From this grounded perspective, ‘heritage’ appears as a ‘fuzzy’ process that not only involves a constant process of formation, but is also necessarily contentious and thus acquires a ‘revelatory’ character, exposing political tensions within urban spaces. This contentiousness challenges the commonplace idea of heritage-making as a process of (temporal, political) stabilization. Continuing this line of argument, in this chapter I suggest that heritage, as a social process and an ideology, may function as a ‘temporal trigger’ – a semiotic disposition that elicits an understanding or argument pertaining to time – revealing the necessarily politicized memories, pasts, futurities and eschatologies that are at stake in particular contexts. Within this framework, I am interested in thinking of ‘heritage’ both as a material form and the narrative disposition (rhetoric) that envelops it. For instance, as recently argued by David Berliner and Chiara Bortolotto (2013), the prevailing, globalized UNESCO-style heritagizing strategy produces a specific kind of ‘world’, in which preservationist and salvationist moralizing narratives pertaining to the remains of the past unfold into future-oriented

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pedagogies and policies organized around ‘transmitting to future generations’. From this perspective, the future – or more precisely, a particular idea of the future – becomes the warranty for both public and private heritagizing endeavours, regardless of the optimism or pessimism with which this future is configured. In any case, this temporalizing complex is worth debating (González-Ruibal 2008), in a moment in which, having survived seemingly apocalyptic postmodern ideas of the ‘end of history’ (see Fukuyama 1992), we also acknowledge that ‘places of memory’ (Nora 1989) still seem to matter, as nostalgia and heritage become buzzwords in the academy, tourism industry and transnational politics (Berliner and Angé 2014). The kind of heritage formations I propose to discuss here, however, are not classical, age-old patina-coated monuments or sites. On the contrary, I will look at new constructions and architectures in the booming Angolan capital Luanda. Buildings under construction that are still covered by scaffolding are already being ‘enveloped’ in heritage discourses: discussed as icons, landmarks or sacralized spaces. Indeed, in Luanda’s urban architectonic displays, the scaffolds themselves are like the banners of new cultural, aesthetic and political paradigms. Symbolizing new horizons, they are referred to as a kind of ‘instant heritage’ or ‘anticipatory heritage’, affected through a process of ‘immediatization’, through which we ‘construct the future memory of our time’ (see also Stengs, this volume). Thus, as I will illustrate below, by immediatization we refer to the urgency and immediate legitimation with which such construction endeavours, supported by governmental sponsorship, emerge in the landscape and become fashioned as ‘landmarks’ in the public space, disconnected and decontextualized from any kind of historical background. Within this logic, here I understand scaffolding as both a metaphor and a material index of this process of immediatization; that which reveals an expectation, the anticipation of a configuration of and for the future. However transitorily, scaffolds transform fictions into facts, and enable a ‘reality’ that is simultaneously an invitation to something ‘new’. They reveal heritage ‘in the making’. Despite their transient character and inherent lack of material value, scaffolds act as a token of moral and political investments, a safeguard that reveals that heritage somehow matters. Obviously, not all construction endeavours and their respective scaffolding necessarily entail a conscious, strategic production of instant heritage. As we will see below in the description of two church constructions in Luanda, there are different, often conflicting uses of construction and scaffolding on behalf of Luandans. At the same time, the omnipresence of scaffolds in construction sites throughout the city operates as an invocation of Luanda as an urban experience, inviting discussion of its legacies and possibilities. The question thus becomes, why, and to whom, do these heritage formations matter? And in what terms? As the editors note in the introduction, in the mainstream academic and political discussions

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concerning heritage there seems to be an underlying argument concerning the problem of public legitimation and the agents and discourses involved in its production and recognition. Within this framework, we could say that scaffolding does not produce legitimation but reveals the kind of (moral, political, economic) investments involved in its production. More than acting as a repository of a heritage configuration, scaffolding exposes the complexity of enterprises, agents and interests at stake. It is, in sum, the signpost that allows the observer to realize that such processes are taking place. Thus, a focus on scaffolding can reveal different and often conflicting heritage formations at work – both official (nation-building) and alternative (‘uncomfortable’ – see Sánchez-Carretero 2013) heritagizations. In what follows, I offer an outline of the heritage landscape of Angola and in particular Luanda. Subsequently, I describe how scaffolding operates through these different formations, producing conflicting notions of heritage and temporality.

Landscapes and Empty Heritages in Luanda In Angola, the notion of heritage is widely present in the public space, where it is the object of contention and political dispute. The starting point for such debates is necessarily the official record: that which stems from state institutions such as the Instituto Nacional do Património Cultural (National Institute of Cultural Heritage) in Luanda, and from the Lei de Património Cultural (Law of Cultural Heritage) of 2005. According to this record, ‘heritage’ refers to items that are ‘of relevant interest for the understanding, preservation and construction of Angolan cultural identity’ (Article 1º; my translation). These include monuments, architectural units and places, as well as immaterial elements, defined or classified according to ‘archeological, historical, ethnological, artistic, architectonic, urban or landscape’ relevance (Art. 7º; my translation). Going through the governmental lists and items of ‘national heritage’, we detect expectable recurrences, such as the problematic conflation of heritage with tourism, religion and nation (see e.g. Berliner 2012). For instance, in one of the very few touristic options made available for the city of Luanda, a five hour City Tour will take you to the Palácio de Ferro (Iron Palace), the Museu da Moeda (Coin Museum), the Museu de Antropologia (Anthropology Museum), the Museu das Forças Armadas (Armed Forces Museum) and the Mausoleu Agostinho Neto (Agostinho Neto Mausoleum).1 Through such an itinerary, the hypothetical tourist would experience, in the same order: a nineteenth century palace, allegedly designed by Alexander Eiffel and reconfigured as a museum (sponsored by DIAMANG, the state diamond company); a token of modern Angolan architecture, recently inaugurated in the city’s frontline; a musealized description of the customs and material culture of the traditional ethnic groups of Angola; the military history of Angolan liberation, located in the early colonial São Miguel fort; and

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finally, the story of the ‘father of the Angolan nation’, the country’s first president, Agostinho Neto, in his mausoleum. In a similar vein, if we consult the list of 87 registered monuments in Luanda, we find that of the 8 religious landmarks listed only one monument is not Catholic (the Methodist Cathedral). Similarly, the edifices included in the proposals advanced by Angola to UNESCO in 1996 for recognition as World Heritage sites are, for the most part, Catholic constructions. This pattern reveals an association of Catholicism and Angolan national identity (see Blanes 2015a, 2015b). A closer look at such lists, however, shows that only certain Catholic monuments are considered ‘heritage’ in the official record: namely, those that have acquired a necessary temporal depth. The ruins of M’banza Kongo, the Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição da Muxima, and others included in the list all date to the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. The same applies to civil monuments, except those associated with the history of the MPLA, the ruling party in Angola since the state’s foundation and thus the producer of the official record. Agostinho Neto’s house (in the neighbourhood of Cazenga), Agostinho Neto’s statue (in the Largo da Independência), the site of the Battle of Kifangondo in 1975 and other features relating to the conflicts surrounding Angolan independence are considered significant heritage sites. 2 Thus, going beyond a statistical analysis of recurrence, our point here is to understand how the official state conception of heritage is marked by a temporality that creates voids, empty heritages and is simultaneously marked by an absolute disconnection between official conceptions of heritage and those of civil society.3 An op-ed published on the website of the Catholic Radio of Angola, authored by Vanda de Carvalho, framed this problem very explicitly: We have just commemorated the Day of Monuments and Landmarks. In Angola, the date was celebrated with pomp and circumstance … [But] Luanda, our beautiful capital, is losing a good deal of its identity. The city previously known as the Paris of Africa in the 1960s is now an amorphous city, with the demolition of historical buildings … If you don’t respect history, you don’t have culture. (Ecclesia, 29 April 2009)4

This comment reveals a critical appreciation of how (material) cultural heritage is being handled and contested in cities like Luanda. This contestation emerges from civic associations, such as the Liga de Defesa do Património Cultural (Cultural Heritage Defense League) as well as from individual figures, such as the architect and anthropologist Ângela Mingas, a heritage activist who actively protested against the demolition of the palace of Ana Joaquina in the late 1990s (see Blanes forthcoming) or the Kinaxixi Square Market in 2007 (see below). As Mingas noted in a recent interview, such acts of demolition, although disastrous in many ways, opened a public debate concerning the problem of heritage in Angola, and encouraged citizens to ‘feel heritage as if it were their own’ (Rede Angola, 3 March 2014).

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Such movements of citizen activism that encourage a ‘personalizing heritage’, as Mingas (Rede Angola, 3 March 2014) proposed, emerge specifically from within the contemporary urban situation of Luanda, which can very blatantly be described as an ‘open air construction site’, considering the complete urban overhaul that the city has been experiencing since the peace accords of 2002. During the decades of civil war (1975–2002) the investment in urban planning was minimal to non-existent. Over the past thirteen years, however, with the increase of oil and diamond revenues (see De Oliveira 2014), the local and national administrations have introduced a radical urban development plan that will eventually transform the urban skyline, to a similar extent as that observed in the late colonial period from the 1950s–1960s (Torres 1986). Today, Luanda is invaded by real-estate tropes such as the ‘New Luanda’ (Nova Luanda), the ‘New Life’ (Nova Vida), etc., which anticipate the arrival of the ‘Modern Angola’ that has been promised by the ruling regime since the days of independence in the 1970s (see Schubert 2014; Blanes and Paxe 2015). Such novel constructions, although not responding to a specific urban design or plan, share a common feature: they are modern architectures, consciously seeking an aesthetic departure from previous constructions. This can be observed in the city’s Marginal (frontline), where the old colonial baixa (downtown) neighbourhood has been almost completely demolished and replaced with a plethora of glassed and mirrored skyscrapers, following what has been described as the ‘Dubaization’ of the city (Moreira 2012). One famous example of this is the Kinaxixi Market building, designed by the modernist architect Vieira da Costa (a student of Le Corbusier) and inaugurated in 1958, relentlessly destroyed in 2008 to make way for a mall and private condo complex (see Gastrow 2014). The Kinaxixi was part of one of the officially registered heritage sites listed by the Ministry of Culture: the ‘historical area of Luanda’, 5 which nevertheless is being progressively torn down by government-sponsored projects. As has been recently described, this Dubaization (see Adham 2014; Choplin and Franck 2014) is at the same time an urban discourse, an architectural paradigm, a financial enterprise and a political imagination, fuelled by oil revenues and based on ideas of luxury, spectacularity, megalomania and decontextualization. This paradigm thus excludes any aesthetic connection with ‘Angolan culture’, and renders the process of new construction incompatible with ideas of local preservation and memory. In this respect, the New Luanda of the frontline is a telling example of how the Dubaization paradigm enables a process of ‘immediatizing heritage’: one that anticipates a future heritagization of such decontextualized, luxurious architectures (see Figure 5.1). Another case in point is what is locally known as the novas centralidades (‘new centralities’), new neighbourhoods of Chinese construction, built on the city outskirts with three initial purposes – the decongestion of the older urban centre, the elimination of musseques (informal housing

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Figure 5.1  The Dubaization of Luanda. Photo by the author.

neighbourhoods) and the inauguration of a new, quality-based lifestyle (Tomás 2012; Croese 2013; Buire 2014; Gastrow 2014; Melo and Viegas 2014; Pitcher and Moorman 2015).6 From an aesthetic point of view, what emerges can be called a logic of departure and separation: entire neighbourhoods built with colourful palettes and decontextualized design, standing in otherwise empty landscapes, away from the chaos of the urban centres (see Figure 5.2). Although they are not gated communities, access to them is complicated. As Claudia Gastrow (2014: 206ff.) described, such elements suggest that more than a recuperation of the old, familiar Luanda there is an explicit attempt at the creation of a new Luandan geography. As one can easily imagine, the Angolan regime’s constructivist paradigm works upon an undercurrent, which is the destruction or abandonment of the old, and the application of violence against objects and subjects that stand in its way. The violence is physical – in the actual demolition of buildings and monuments – as well as epistemological – in the silences around these processes of demolition. Claudio Fortuna, an Angolan sociologist, once referred to this movement by the common Luandan phrase bota abaixo (‘throw down’), the logic of erasure and destruction of anything that stands out, both physically and metaphorically. Anne Pitcher and Marissa Moorman recently and aptly described this process as ‘burying the past with phantasmagorias of the future’ (2015), in which acts of demolition of ‘old Luandas’ are performed with the

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Figure 5.2  The new centrality of Kilamba. Photo by the author.

superimposition of an announced future. For a vast majority of Luandans, these government-sponsored phantasmagorias, enforcing collective imaginations of a renewed, modern Luanda and Angola, are disturbingly dual: they are dreamlike sequences, because they translate into never-ending construction sites, and when finished they remain enclosed, inaccessible, privatized; yet they are real, because the effects of their construction are felt, in the eyes, nose, ears and skin that absorb the sounds of the jackhammers, the dust and the smell of sewers exposed by the construction. Dream or reality, such phantasmagorias have been the pretexts for the destruction of several landmarks, ‘places of no history’ (Blanes 2018), and are indicative of a particular historiographical manipulation. The outcome is what Vanessa Watson describes in her reflection on ‘African urban fantasies’ (2013): while the regime fashions an imagined ‘new city’, the progressive transformation of the urban space into a ‘developmental haven’ deepens the experience of inequality and destitution for a majority of urban dwellers (Harvey 2000; Gastrow 2017; see also Blanes forthcoming). Through this temporal manipulation, the regime creates a vacuous urban space, one in which dissenting or alternative views, projects and expectations for the city are silenced (see Herzfeld 1991). Meanwhile, and despite the existence of a National Institute of Heritage and Culture under the aegis of that same Ministry of Culture, the idea and practice of heritage remains precarious and subject to political discretion.

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The Aesthetics of Scaffolding Within this framework of an urban paradigm that flags construction yet nevertheless relies upon destruction, scaffolding would initially appear as a ‘negative’ aesthetic statement, in the sense that it is necessary, transient and usually perceived as an unpleasant element of the architectural and constructionist endeavour. It is not invested with a paradigmatic aesthetic envelope, but becomes an index of an impending, imminent transformation, precisely because it exposes the infrastructural dynamics taking place in the urban space. In many ways, scaffolding becomes part of what Birgit Meyer called an ‘aesthetic of persuasion’ (2010; see also the introduction to this volume), in the sense that it is inserted within a semiotic ideology that appeals to specific sensations and senses of community. It creates an environ of what Adam Chau (2008) called ‘red-hot sociality’, a ritualized space of intense, heightened sensorial production that affects modes of knowing and being. Scaffolding, from this point of view, has a dual condition: it is devoid of any kind of (material, moral, political, aesthetic) investment, but it conjures a sensorium that opens up the spaces and possibilities of meaning. It is an infrastructure, in the sense advocated by Mamadou Diouf and Rosalind Fredericks (2014). They argue, along with Abdoumaliq Simone (2004, 2014), towards the density of logics governing the city, which not only participate in overarching, globalized ‘geographies of knowledge’ (Diouf and Fredericks 2014: 1), but also reveal pluralisms and refractions (Tomás 2012), competing epistemological operations and political disputes. From this perspective, the scaffolding is transient, but somehow perpetuates itself in the continuity of the construction work that invades the city, the famous ‘city yet to come’ that Abdoumaliq Simone (2004) talked about. Within this framework, in Luanda scaffolding is both the announcement of the ‘Luanda yet to come’ – the modern, blissful New Luanda that despite the ongoing processes of ‘Dubaization’ remains to be confirmed – and of other Luandas that either resist the New Luanda or simply attempt to imagine other urban configurations. It is precisely these divergent ‘announcements’ that are signalled by the presence of scaffolding in different parts of the city that we will discuss below in the ethnographic case studies presented. My argument here, then, is that this transient yet somehow self-­ perpetuating quality of scaffolding is a central element in contemporary social life in Luanda – where, as I will elaborate below, religion plays a central part – and the concomitant emergence of heritage formations. But these formations, although largely dominated by a regime-sponsored authenticating paradigm, do not exhaust themselves in it, and in fact become sites and objects of political contention, exposing diverse and possibly competing temporalizing configurations. In this respect, I follow two theoretical proposals that offer interesting counter-intuitive understandings of the materiality of constructions and architectures. The first can be found in Ann Laura Stoler’s work on the ‘imperial debris’ of ruins

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and r­ uinations (2013), in which she exposes how the marks of the (imperial) past become active in the present in multiple, differentiated fashions. From  this perspective, ruins and debris are no longer empty, harmless remnants, but still inhabit peoples’ lives and inform political environs. The same could be said, I argue, of the objects, infrastructures and ­materials – from scaffolding to bricks, mortar and paint buckets – that surround and inform architectural endeavours throughout the city. But, as Gastón Gordillo (2014) also reminds us, ruin, debris and rubble have an afterlife of their own (see also Stengs, this volume). In his ethnography of the Chaco landscape in Argentina, Gordillo notes how ruins and traces can be seen to demonstrate the existence of multiplicities in the ruptured past that produced those same ruins – making their ethnography one of disentangling the apparent sameness and uniformity of rubble. In a gross simplification of Gordillo’s argument, we could say that what appears to us as a useless or irrelevant amalgamation of materials and objects (rocks, stone, dust, etc.) in fact inherits a complex political history that can be revelatory if we shift our perspective and focus upon it. Subsequently, we can argue that the same occurs with the apparently irrelevant bits and pieces that we find in and around the construction sites of the city – those bricks, mortars, scaffolding, etc. we just mentioned: they are more than just signals of ongoing or unsuccessful construction. As in the cases described by Stoler (2013) and Gordillo (2014), I argue that in Luanda, the materiality and sensoriality of architecture embody different and diverging temporalities that balance between ideas of distant, ‘heavy’ pasts and logics of  immediate futures. Within this framework, construction infrastructures not  only trigger such temporalities but also enable their heritagization. In Luanda, religious buildings and monuments play an active role in the production of such temporalities, not only because, as I described above, they embody different configurations of meaningful and not so meaningful heritage from an Angolan state point of view, but because they are active contributors to the construction processes going on in the city, sponsoring the construction of temples, churches, cathedrals and other religious infrastructures in a landscape that has been described as one of ‘booming religion’ (Viegas 2007). Indeed, much of the scaffolding we see throughout the city of Luanda belongs to religious institutions that have actively embarked upon a competitive politics of visual display and public legitimation. As a Luandan friend once told me in 2012, ‘church cathedrals create paradigms; if one church builds one, the church next door will try to build an even bigger one’. I will attempt to pursue this idea with one example, which, as a red herring of sorts, will lead me to other counter-examples. I am referring to a cathedral inaugurated in 2012, by the leader of the Tokoist Church, Bishop Afonso Nunes, in the Golfe neighbourhood of Luanda (see Blanes 2014, 2015a). Today the cathedral, boasting a late baroque style, stands out in the local landscape as one of the most impressive religious infrastructures

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in the city, overshadowing the traditional ‘tropical modernist’ style of Catholic churches such as Sagrada Família or São Domingos, and more recent neoclassical-styled temples built by the Universal Church in the Kingdom of God, such as Alvalade, and Benfica, inaugurated in the early 2000s (see Swatowiski forthcoming). This architectural index tells of a selection process of sorts, one that privileges a certain kind of urban configuration against others, as noted in the previous sections. In the framework of my research with the Tokoist Church, I had the chance to visit the Golfe site in 2008, a few years before its completion. Guided by the church’s bishop, we circulated through the construction site, and listened to detailed descriptions of the architectural plan and organization. At the time, I recall feeling somewhat sceptical regarding the cathedral’s completion, considering that during the visit there was no visible sign of active construction work going on, except for a small group of volunteers working on one side of the building. Yet, despite the fact that the construction was still in its infrastructural phase, from the excited speech of the bishop we could almost imagine the building in its final form: according to him, it was to become a national, nay, continental reference, the largest Christian cathedral to be built in Africa (see Blanes 2015a; see Figure 5.3 and 5.4). Indeed, after the involvement of a Chinese construction company, the cathedral was finally finished in 2012. Although we cannot ascertain if it is indeed the largest in Africa, it is certainly an architectural landmark in present day Luanda. It became an immediate reference point in the religious landscape of the city, competing with previous and currently existing cathedrals, in what was aptly called the ‘politics of cathedrals’ (Mafra 2003): the idea of competing architectures, emerging within the progressive recognition of a public space for religious institutions, as a space of proselytism and political agency. Within this framework, through their architectural display, they become media-scapes, spaces of aesthetic statement geared towards a politics of what Birgit Meyer and Marleen de Witte (2013) referred to as ‘persuasion’, of advocating specific forms of belief in the plural, public space – hoping to produce a ‘tuning’ of the senses (De Witte 2011) in order to become somehow appealing. In this respect, the anthropologist Clara Mafra (2003) described how, in Brazil, Pentecostal churches engaged in an architectural and decorative process of seduction that expressed their ideology of ‘abundance’ and ultimately rendered their temples as ‘art objects’. Within this framework, Pentecostal temples become ‘nexuses’ in the sense advocated by Alfred Gell (1998): agents of the production of community, on the one hand, and of seduction/captivation of the non-convert, on the other (Mafra 2003: 100). This is also what Oscar Verkaaik (2013) suggests, when he notes that religious architecture not only displays but also performs religious identity, comprising its social and political dimensions (2013: 10). This logic of affective and seductive architecture responds, I argue, to one objective of heritage formation: that of

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Figures 5.3 and 5.4  The Tokoist Cathedral, then and now. Photos by the author.

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acquiring (visual, geographical, social) status in the local landscape by way of legitimation and canonization. Through heritagization, such modern constructions become self-entitled landmarks; subsequently, by becoming architectural ‘landmarks’ that incorporate mise en scènes and symbolic elements, they produce a sense of sacralization. As Meyer and De Witte (2013) recently argued, both processes are often concomitant, through the simultaneous invocation of senses of ‘tradition’ and ‘transcendence’. In this respect, as Mattijs van de Port (2006) rightly pointed out, this sacralization requires an element of visualization in order to process its public, legitimate character through scenographic displays of symbolism and iconicity. Keeping the significance of visualization in mind, one could say that the process of heritagization of the Tokoist Cathedral was already in process long before its completion, as it was implicated, from its genesis and architectural design, in a project of public legitimation on behalf of the church leadership (Blanes 2014). As mentioned above, it was built using a late baroque inspiration, precisely to achieve a particular status of grandeur, abundance and persuasion. Several visual elements displayed throughout the compound reveal this: the exceedingly high gates of the entrance, the open patio, the star-shaped water fountain (one of the few in Luanda that actually work) and, particularly, the golden lion that presides over the court (Blanes 2015a). These decorative elements follow a logic of fabrication of iconicity (Beekers and Arab 2016) that has provoked both praise and critique (Blanes 2015a), but in any case has enabled a medium for a process of public ‘authorization’ – manifestation and recognition (Meyer 2011). Thus, the emergence and materialization of the cathedral cannot be understood outside the strategy of social and political legitimation deployed by the church leadership. As I describe elsewhere (Blanes 2014, 2015a), the leadership of the Tokoist Church was the object of intense, violent dispute after the death of its prophet-founder Simão Gonçalves Toko (1918–1984). As a consequence, the church split into several, opposing groups. In the year 2000, Afonso Nunes took the leadership of one such branch and dramatically transformed its financial, demographic and political situation in Angola (Blanes 2014, 2015a). The reconstruction undertaken by Bishop Nunes not only involved an attempt at reunification of the estranged groups but also the inauguration of a new style of leadership, which can be defined as ‘modern’ and ‘universalizing’, and which, we can assume, at least from a demographic perspective, has become hegemonic within the contemporary following of Simão Toko. Thus, the inauguration of the cathedral was not only the culmination of a multifarious process of renewal and innovation within the church, involving liturgical, theological, economic and political transformations, it also symbolized that process. In this process, ideas of ‘reconstruction’, ‘restoration’ and ‘reunification’ became subsumed within a more visible operation of ‘construction’, made manifest in the new cathedral. This transformation was highlighted with the coining of a ‘new era’

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in the church, after which the year 2000 became re-baptized as the year ‘0000’ – a revelation of the future-oriented temporality at stake. From this perspective, the cathedral represented, through its immediate heritagization, the enactment of a temporal incision, one that moves away from a sense of past and tradition, and simultaneously collapses the messianic future into the here and now. If, however, we can recognize such processes of immediate heritagization, relying upon a hegemonic or paradigmatic understanding of public architecture, within a framework of construction of social and political legitimacy, we can also find ‘others’ that either contest them or simply engage in alternative processes. This is the case, for instance, with members of the Tokoist Church that contest the current hegemonic leadership of Bishop Nunes. One such group is known as the Doze Mais Velhos (‘The Twelve Elders’).7 The Twelve Elders not only feel that the cathedral is the result of a megalomania that is not representative of this religious movement’s trajectory and worldview – in particular that of Simão Toko (Blanes 2014)  – they also believe it signifies a significant theological rupture or ‘betrayal’: an abandonment of the church’s traditional messianic experience of martyrdom, austerity and expectation, and a movement towards a Pentecostal-like ‘immediatization’ of the Kingdom of God (see Blanes 2015a). As I explain elsewhere in more detail (2014), this religious movement appeared in the late colonial period and became a beacon of anti-colonialist resistance, largely because Toko and his followers were actively persecuted by the colonial regime, enduring prison, deportation, torture and death. This persecution, which continued after Angolan independence,8 did not impede the church’s growth. Simultaneously (and unwillingly) it cultivated an ethos of austerity and discretion among Tokoist followers, who were traditionally cautious regarding the politics of governance in Angola. With Nunes’ arrival, this attitude became a point of conflict among the Tokoists. Several confrontations emerged invoking issues of orthodoxy/heterodoxy and conservatism/innovation. Importantly, the strategy of claiming public legitimation, of which the cathedral is the linchpin, also implied an approximation to the governmental agenda. This conformity is seen by sectors such as the Twelve Elders as a ‘betrayal’ of Simão Toko’s original message, which advocated a distance from partisan politics (Blanes 2015a). Within this framework, the Bishop’s performance of an epistemological and political rupture runs parallel with the kind of tabula rasa constructivism sponsored by the government in its promotion of the New Angola, replacing old heritages with new ones in a historical moment in which, after the armistice of 2002 that put an end to almost 30 years of civil war in the country, both state and mainstream religious institutions, including the Bishop’s church, embarked upon a public discourse of ‘renewal’ and social reconstruction, driven by the slogan ‘os ganhos da paz’ (‘the benefits of peace’). This parallel between governmental and church agendas is why the critique of the Bishop’s leadership is also framed

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Figure 5.5  The Tokoist temple in Palanca. Photo by the author.

within a critique of the social and political situation in Luanda and Angola in general (Blanes 2015a). Meanwhile, unlike the bishop’s flamboyant and notorious cathedral, the Twelve Elders’ temple remains hidden in the barely accessible streets of the Palanca neighbourhood,9 awaiting completion (see Figure 5.5).

Other Heritages The case of the Tokoist Church is, I believe, illustrative of how architectural heritage aesthetics not only exceed politically based paradigms, but also, following the previous suggestion by Gordillo (2014), require conceptual disentanglement. My subsequent suggestion is that Luanda’s contemporary religious scene is an active space for the expression of political dissent and ethnic differentiation through processes of heritagizing architectural aesthetics. Perhaps the religious phenomenon that illustrates this differentiation best is the so-called Mpeve ya Nlongo (‘Holy Spirit’) movement. Mpeve ya Nlongo is an umbrella term that covers several different religious expressions, most of which find their way into Luanda from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo). They combine, in diverse fashion, Christian theology with traditional healing practices. Luandan Bakongo themselves refer to the Mpeve ya Nlongo as a straightforward

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‘professional conversion’ of former kimbandeiros (‘sorcerers’, adapted from the local Umbundu language) into a Christian template, in order to avoid the ongoing characterization of witchcraft (ndoki) as a social problem by powerful external agents such as the Catholic Church and the state (Pereira 2015; Soares 2016; Blanes 2017a). Sorcerers would also join Mpeve ya Nlongo to expand their ‘market’, so to speak, to wider audiences. Under the umbrella term, Mpeve ya Nlongo, we can find quite diverse phenomena, ranging from established institutions such as the ICUES (Igreja Cristã da União do Espírito Santo – Christian Church of the Union of the Holy Spirit) to makeshift movements that emerge around the healing ministry of local leaders, with diverging methods of appropriating Christian theology and liturgy. These ‘churches’10 can be found all around certain neighbourhoods of Luanda – Palanca being a case in point – and the vast majority are illegal or unrecognized ventures. This clandestine condition is simultaneously a product of the state’s lack of interest in recognizing new churches, and more significantly, of the lack of interest of Mpeve ya Nlongo leaders in being recognized. Mpeve ya Nlongo practitioners generally prefer to work in the margins, so to speak, and inside the neighbourhoods, in order to avoid the regime’s control (see Blanes 2015b). In such musseques, they compete with dozens of other Christian and non-Christian movements that, voluntarily or involuntarily, lack official recognition.11 Within this plural setting, if some churches present in Luandan neighbourhoods such as Palanca aim towards a politics of visual display, others make themselves known in the neighbourhood through other means, such as acoustic statements: making themselves ‘visible’ and present by the amplification of their ritual (music, preaching, prayer). The binding element here is ‘infrastructure’, ascertainable through a temporal perspective. In other words, we observe processes of ordering through the evolution of architectural statements in the Palanca, and how they are connected with what Brian Larkin (2013) has recently called the ‘politics and poetics of infrastructure’: networks of flows and exchanges of people, ideas and significance that find physical expression in, for instance, architectures and constructions, as well as in particular aesthetic envelopes (see Rowlands 2008). In practical terms, this is expressed in the fact that in the Palanca, as in most musseques, the vast majority of church infrastructures in the neighbourhood are not technically finished – the exception being the ‘wealthier’ churches such as the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) and the Baptist church (see Figures 5.6 and 5.7). Most churches remain in a permanent state of construction, in which we can observe their previous evolution as well as their expected, ambitious conclusions. For instance, if churches such as the UCKG have imposed a specific aesthetics in the neighbourhood – with a palette that shifted from red/white to gold/brown in the late 2000s, other smaller, less resourceful churches dwell in more or

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Figures 5.6 and 5.7  Churches in the Palanca. Photos by the author.

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less precarious conditions, performing their services in locations otherwise unrecognizable as religious spaces. Most of them, in one way or another, incorporate scaffolding. This infrastructural logic not only reveals the financial and public ‘state’ of churches, but also their aesthetic, visual and concomitantly political statements – how they choose or manage to establish a more or less public position in the local neighbourhood. From this perspective, I am explicitly moving beyond the ‘developmental’ argument: looking at such infrastructures as partaking inevitably in similar architectural directions and ambitions – the above-mentioned ‘cathedral politics’. In fact, in places like Palanca we look at infrastructures together with their scaffolding: the people, objects, devices, instruments, organizations and relationalities that surround them and make them materialize in the urban space. Here I am reminded of Roger Sansi’s invocation (2014) of ‘small-scale models’, to help us think about the importance of locality and micropolitics in the material expression of infrastructure, much in the same vein as has been recently proposed by Alberto Corsín-Jiménez (2013) with his suggestion to think of social relationships through processes of ‘prototyping’, focusing upon the experimental quality of crafting and engineering in and through material elements and social relationships. Taking this conception of prototyping into consideration, we realize that, although this is indeed a recurrent theme in and around Luanda, not all churches and movements in the Palanca are interested or participating in processes of patrimonial wealth, growth and ostentatious visibility. Other processes of making heritage persuasive may also be in play. One example of such alternative heritage-making is the briefly mentioned ICUES, a Mpeve ya Nlongo church founded by the prophet Tata Gonda Wasilua Wangitukulu in the DR Congo and present in Luanda since the late 1980s, which I frequented in the fall of 2013. One of its church buildings is located in the southern section of the Palanca, in a square ‘decorated’ with a ‘lake’ composed of unknown liquid substances, a remnant of the rainy season and the accumulation of trash. If in the inside it is painted and minimally conserved, from the outside it looks like just another abandoned construction, with mouldy, decaying mortar, rusty steel rods and unfinished corners. However, as I would later learn, this particular construction was imbued with a highly symbolic feature, as it stood on the spot where the first ICUES church of Luanda had been built in 1981 as a chapa or corrugated iron construction, later, after 1999, reconstructed as an actual building with walls. My first visit in November 2013 was on a special occasion, as it was the first time that the ICUES leader in Angola, pastor Nunes Sungo, had visited the building after several decades of conflict with a secessionist group within the church, which claimed ownership of this and other church buildings. As the ICUES is one of the few Holy Spirit churches that are officially recognized in Angola, the secession conflict acquired

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a legal character, and was taken to the national courts. In the meantime, the network of ICUES temples in the neighbourhoods of Luanda became divided into ‘official’ and ‘mutineer’ churches – the definition of which depended on the interlocutor speaking. During my work with the church, the court verdict found the secessionist group guilty of usurpation, and ordered the restitution of patrimony to the ‘official’ leadership. On this particular occasion, a prayer session was held by Pastor Sungo, intended as an act of ‘restoration’ and purification of the space until then occupied by the ‘secessionists’, as if expelling the negativity of accumulated dispute over the previous years (see Figure 5.8). To my knowledge, the group of about fifty people who attended the prayer service was not composed of formerly estranged members that had attended that same building before the court order, but rather a group of prophets and followers who worked closely with Pastor Sungo and were summoned for the task of restoration that would allow the pastor to reoccupy the church. From this perspective, what occurred there was an act of occupation (or reoccupation, from this group’s perspective) of the space, in which the scaffolding suggested a sense of movement and event, an impending intervention. But, beyond the interest in r­ ecuperating, ­refurbishing and finishing the building, the major concern was an act of integration (or reintegration) of the building infrastructure within the church topography, renewing the church’s jurisdiction. According to the pastor, this could only

Figure 5.8  Prayer in the ICUES temple in Palanca. Photo by the author.

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Figure 5.9  The ICUES temple in Palanca. Photo by the author.

take place through prayer and intercession: a process of ordering through a ritual praxis and a spiritual cleansing. From this perspective, if at a first glance the ICUES temple appeared as ‘dead architecture’ (see Figure 5.9), rotting in an unseen corner of a Luandan musseque, its interior reveals how the space has political agency, due to its integration within a logic of conflict and dissent. Thus, the scaffolding that sustained the building in one piece also sustained something else: a religious tradition and memory, struggling against a movement of rupture and secession.

Conclusion Religious movements like ICUES or the Tokoist Church represent two of the abundant processes of religious heritage formation taking place in present-day Luanda. In the ethnographic examples that stand central in

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this chapter, these movements share a common feature: the investment in urban architecture as part of a process of instantaneous heritagization on behalf of such institutions, inserted within an internal, conflictual politics of dissent. However, the material expression in both cases is, to say the least, diverse: if in one case the object of dispute was an architectural statement of persuasion (the cathedral), in the other the object was an invisible infrastructure in apparent decay. The common ground for such processes was precisely the presence of scaffolding – the metaphor and materialization of transience and expectation, of reshuffling ideas of past and future into ever-changing heritage formations. Within the wider setting of Luanda, such processes occurring in the religious sphere replicate a larger issue: the way contemporary construction enterprises (and the scaffolding that ensues) are engaged in ideas of ‘instant heritage’ formation, but are simultaneously producing the erasure of other heritages, either through physical processes of demolition or through the promotion of heritage paradigms that following a futureoriented, developmental logic do not allow for a plural landscape. This destructive creation reveals that the processes of heritage formation, and the temporalities they entail, are anything but linear and stable, and more often than not entail a politics of dissent. Yet, amidst the ruins and rubble of this constructivist paradigm, we can still find other heritage formations at work. Ruy Llera Blanes (Spanish National Research Council; School of Global Studies of Gothenburg University) is an anthropologist specialized in Angola, where he he has conducted research on religion, mobility (diasporas, transnationalism, the Atlantic), politics (leadership, charisma, repression, resistance, utopia), temporalities (historicity, memory, heritage, expectations), knowledge and gender. He is also co-editor of the journal Advances in Research: Religion and Society, edited by Berghahn. His recent publications include: A Prophetic Trajectory (Berghahn, 2014); The Social Life of Spirits (University of Chicago Press, 2013, edited with Diana Espírito Santo); Being Godless: Ethnographies of Atheism and Nonreligion (Berghahn, 2017, edited with Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic).

Notes   1. http://www.welcometoangola.co.ao/_city_tour_luanda_almoco_5hrs&ctd=37#.   2. The MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) emerged in the late 1950s and became one of the protagonists of the Angolan liberation wars against Portugal. Embracing a soviet-based communist ideology, they reached the position of ruling party after the Alvor Accords of 1975, declaring Agostinho Neto as first president of the new country. In 1979, after Neto’s death, the leadership was taken by José Eduardo dos Santos, who remains the country’s president to this date. The MPLA began by enforcing a Marxist-Leninist agenda. But the civil war that ensued (and

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lasted until 2002), and the end of the Cold War, eventually gave way to a form of authoritarian state capitalism (see De Oliveira 2014).   3. Some examples of such historical voids include events and protagonists that are not included in the regime’s own ‘victorious history’ (see Blanes 2017b). For instance, the late colonial period beyond the viewpoint of the liberation wars, or the historical role of other political parties in the process of independency, or post-independence conflict (ibid.).   4. http://www.radioecclesia.org/index.php?option=com_flexicontent&view=items&cid =195:angola&id=6347:patrimonio-cultural-em-debate-&Itemid=715#.V9GSem X9U68 (accessed 27 August 2016).   5. Listed as number 72 in a list of 87 registered sites in Luanda, as we can see in http:// www.mincultura.gv.ao/monumentos_reg_angola.htm  6. This project is a result from a government housing policy, following from the  Lei  do  Fomento Habitacional of 2007. These new centralities can be found in Zango, Km. 44, Cacuaco and especially Kilamba – the flagship of this new housing policy.   7. This group is composed of the survivors and descendants of the first followers of Simão Toko since the inception of the church in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa, DR Congo) in 1949. They are thus seen as the ‘original’ followers of Toko.   8. This continuation of the persecution against Tokoists was motivated, among other things, by the MPLA’s proclaimed anti-religious stance in its first years of rule, and by Simão Toko’s refusal to mobilize his followers to participate in the civil war that ensued independence (Blanes and Paxe 2015).   9. Palanca is one of Luanda’s traditional musseque (slum) neighbourhoods, known for being predominantly occupied by Bakongo inhabitants. 10. The quotation marks are a reference to the demographic, institutional and spatial diversity and complexity behind such movements. 11. There are thousands of churches pending approval since the last round of official recognition of churches in 1992 (Viegas 2007).

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———. 2014. ‘Negotiated Settlements: Housing and the Aesthetics of Citizenship in Luanda, Angola’, PhD Dissertation. University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology. Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. González-Ruibal, A. 2008. ‘Time to Destroy: An Archaeology of Supermodernity’, Current Anthropology 49(2): 247–79. Gordillo, G. 2014. Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Harvey, D. 2000. Spaces of Hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Herzfeld, M. 1991. A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Larkin, B. 2013. ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure’, Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327–43. Mafra, C. 2003. ‘A Sedução em Tempos de Abundância: Análise dos Templos Pentecostais como Objectos de Arte’, in O. Velho (ed.), Circuitos Infinitos: Comparações e Religiões no Brasil, Argentina, Portugal, França e Grã-Bretanha. São Paulo: Attar Editorial, pp. 97–126. Melo, V. and S. Viegas. 2014. ‘Habitação de Iniciativa Pública em Luanda e Maputo: Modelos de Intervenção e Impactos Socioterritoriais no Novo Milénio’, Pós 21(36): 124–40. Meyer, B. 2010. ‘Aesthetics of Persuasion: Global Christianity and Pentecostalism’s Sensational Forms’, South Atlantic Quarterly 109(4): 741–63. ———. 2011. ‘Medium’, Material Religion 7(1): 58–65. Meyer, B. and M. De Witte. 2013. ‘Heritage and the Sacred: Introduction’, Material Religion 9(3): 274–81. Moreira, P. 2012. ‘A Cumplicidade de Lisboa na Dubaização de Luanda’. Paper presented at the Grupo de História Global de Espaços, Aspirações Urbanas na Pós-Colonialidade. Porto, February. Nora, P. 1989. ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire’, Representations 26: 7–24. Pereira, L. 2015. Os Bakongo de Angola: Etnicidade, Religião e Parentesco num Bairro de Luanda. Rio de Janeiro: Contra Capa. Pitcher, A. and M. Moorman. 2015. ‘City Building in Post-Conflict, PostSocialist Luanda: Burying the Past with Phantasmagorias of the Future’, in E. Pieterse and N. Edjabe (eds), African Cities Reader III: Land, Property and Value. Cape Town: African Centre for Cities and Chimurenga Magazine, pp. 123–35. Rowlands, M. 2008. ‘The Sound of Witchcraft: Noise as Mediation in Religious Transmission’, in D. Berliner and R. Sarró (eds), Learning Religion: Anthropological Approaches. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 191–208. Sánchez-Carretero. 2013. ‘Patrimonialización de Espacios represivos: En Torno a la Gestión de los Patrimonios Incómodos en España’, in C. Ortiz

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(ed.), Lugares de Represión, Paisajes de Memoria: Aspectos Materiales y Simbólicos de la Cárcel de Carabanchel. Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata, pp. 28–41. Sansi, R. 2014. Art, Anthropology and the Gift. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Schubert, J. 2014. ‘Working the System: Affect, Amnesia and the Aesthetics of Power in the New Angola’, PhD Dissertation. University of Edinburgh, African Studies. Simone, A. 2004. For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. ———. 2014. ‘Too Many Things to Do: Social Dimensions of City-Making in Africa’, in M. Diouf and R. Fredericks (eds), The Arts of Citizenship in African Cities: Infrastructures and Spaces of Belonging. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 25–47. Soares, P. 2016. ‘Um Estudo Etnográfico sobre o Acolhimento e Reintegração Social de Crianças Acusadas de Feitiçaria em Angola’, MA Dissertation. ISCTE-IUL Lisbon, Social Anthropology. Stoler, A. (ed.). 2013. Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Swatowiski, C. Forthcoming. ‘Catedral do Alvalade – Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus’ (submitted). Tomás, A. 2012. ‘Refracted Governmentality: Space, Politics and Social Structure in Contemporary Luanda’, PhD Dissertation. Columbia University. Torres, A. 1986. ‘Le Processus d’Urbanisation de l’Angola dans le Période Coloniale (Années 1940–1970)’, Estudos de Economia 7(1): 23–57. Van de Port, M. 2006. ‘Visualizing the Sacred: Video Technology, Televisual Style and the Religious Imagination in Bahian Candomblé’, American Ethnologist 33(3): 444–61. Verkaaik, O. 2013. ‘Religious Architecture: Anthropological Perspectives’, in O.Verkaaik (ed.), Religious Architecture: Anthropological Perspectives. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 7–24. Viegas, F. 2007. Panorama das Religiões em Angola: Dados Estatísticos 2007. Luanda: INAR – Instituto Nacional para os Assuntos Religiosos. Watson, V. 2013. ‘African Urban Fantasies: Dreams or Nightmares?’ Environment & Urbanization 26(1): 215–31.

6 Corpo-Reality TV

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Media, Body and the Authentication of ‘African Heritage’

Marleen de Witte

Introduction Iiiiiiiit’s Big! It’s our culture, our music, our tradition. F&B Consult and Kasapreko Company Limited proudly bring to you another mind-blowing reality show, the Kasapreko Omanye Aba show, installing the rich traditions and cultures of the people of Ghana, starting with the Greater Accra Region. Watch out for Tema, Teshie, Nungua, Prampram, Ada, Osu, Jamestown and Chorkor as they go about their traditions for you to savour and enjoy. —programme jingle Omanye Aba, TV Africa

In 2010, a new reality TV show hit the Ghanaian airwaves on one of the country’s commercial TV stations, TV Africa, a station geared towards the promotion of what it calls ‘African heritage’.1 The show, titled Omanye Aba after a ritual acclamation in the local Ga language, was a huge success. ‘The freshest and the first ever culture-based reality show in the country’, its concept to use television entertainment to ‘regenerate and reignite our culture as a people’ struck chords across the country. In a weekly live show from the TV Africa studio in Accra, it featured a talent competition between cultural troupes from various Ga communities in the Greater Accra Region that performed selected aspects of their community’s cultural heritage – including town history, festivals, royal funeral rites, marriage rites and traditional dance. In the week preceding the show, the members of the cultural troupes, mainly young people, studied the details of the assignment from their elders at the chief’s palace in their community and transformed

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what they learnt into choreographies fit for television. A jury consisting of traditional spiritual leaders, Ga personalities and entertainment professionals judged their performances, but the decisive judgement came from the Ghanaian public. As in televised elimination contests worldwide, the show’s audience voted for their favourite group via text message, until in the last broadcast Nungua Cultural Troupe was declared the winner. This chapter explores the redesigning of local, community-based traditions in the globalized format of a reality talent show on nationwide television. In Ghana, cultural heritage has long been associated with political authorities: on the one hand, the traditional authorities, who are regarded as the custodians and embodiments of particular ethnic traditions, imagined as rooted in a past before European contact; and, on the other hand, the Ghanaian state, that has long stimulated the formation of a national cultural heritage as part of a nationalist identity project (see also Schramm 2004; Coe 2006). Whilst the former have retained their role as ultimate icons of heritage, with the turn to neo-liberal policy in the 1990s the national state has increasingly retreated from its role as guardian of cultural heritage, giving way to the forces of the market. Heritage and tradition have become matters of business, marketing and entertainment (De Witte and Meyer 2012; see also Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). Cultural heritage has thus become a plural, discursive and aesthetic field, in which a variety of actors – from state officials, chiefs and ethnic activists to religious leaders and cultural entrepreneurs – seek to convince audiences to buy into the authority and authenticity of their particular versions of tradition and heritage. As this chapter demonstrates, such convincing happens through narrative as much as through sensory and affective means: through what Mattijs van de Port and Birgit Meyer in the introduction to this volume term an ‘aesthetics of persuasion’. Commercial audiovisual media have come to play an important part in the heritage arena. Sponsored by Kasapreko, one of Ghana’s major alcoholic beverage manufacturers and sponsor for many traditional festivals, the Omanye Aba show, and TV Africa as a whole, addresses a growing, mainly urban market for ‘African heritage’ as style and entertainment. This new ‘joint venture’ between cultural heritage and commercial television raises intriguing questions concerning the aesthetic power of particular heritage items and the ways people identify with them. What is it in such TV productions that can, indeed, ‘regenerate’ and ‘reignite’ historical legacies such as ‘town history’, ‘traditional dance’ and ‘royal funeral rites’ as ‘our culture as a people’: as a source of collective essence? What is it that enthuses audiences who have, in recent decades, been far more thrilled by the fresh vibe of global popular culture than by the somewhat stale domain of cultural heritage: a domain they were happy to leave to older generations and cultural authorities. What energies and logics come together here to give such old forms new life, propelling them to catch fire among young urban audiences?

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Heritage, Television and the Authenticating Body As set out in the introduction to this volume, heritage is always a construction, subject to dynamic processes of reinventing culture within particular social-political formations. As a framework of metacultural production (Kirshenblatt-Gimblet 2004), heritage is tied to particular forms and formats of mediation that bestow selected objects, practices, stories and sites inherited from the past with particular value and a particular aesthetic appeal. Heritage and media are, therefore, not to be understood as separate realms merging in the process of media representation (that is – ­heritage as ‘given’ before it is re-presented by ‘the media’), rather heritage is intrinsically mediated. Heritage does not exist outside the particular media forms – from museums and monuments to written and illustrated canons and mass media renderings – that present and frame the past as ‘heritage’. Heritage, then, always needs to be, at least to some extent, designed – given material/aesthetic form – and redesigned – given new form when old forms no longer suffice. What is new, in the case under discussion here, is not the coming together of heritage and media per se, but rather, the redesign of heritage through a particular genre of commercial reality television: the talent show. This merging of cultural heritage and reality TV is interesting in light of the central themes of this volume. First, heritage politics and reality TV share a particular concern with authenticity that stands in paradoxical tension with their production: the ‘making of’ heritage or reality TV shows. As I will elaborate below, this tension has grown particularly pronounced in postcolonial Africa, where concerted state efforts at building national canons of cultural heritage were driven by ideologies of African identity and selfhood that placed cultural authenticity in precolonial ‘times immemorial’ (see Rowlands and De Jong 2007; Peterson et al. 2015). While much effort went into the selection, remaking, framing and mediating of local traditions as cultural heritage, the appeal of this heritage rested, to an important extent, on its promise to provide an essential, pre-existing ground to African authenticity. As a result, ‘African heritage’, despite being historically produced as part of the colonial encounter, has acquired lasting connotations of givenness and purity. Reality TV rests on a similar paradox of making and authenticating. ‘What ties together all the various formats of reality TV’, Laurie Ouelette and Susan Murray (2009: 5) write in their introduction to the genre, ‘is their professed abilities to … provide viewers an unmediated … look into what might be called the “entertaining real”. This fixation with “authentic” personalities, situations, problems, and narratives is considered to be reality TV’s primary distinction from fictional television and also its primary selling point’. In the specific subgenre of the talent show, this entertaining real is the ‘ordinary person’ (‘real people’ as opposed to celebrities or professionals), who happens to have a special talent. As with

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heritage, there is a strong invocation of givenness here, ‘real talent’ being understood as a natural gift and opposed to skill acquired through hard practice: again, given as opposed to made. But while reality TV thus ‘whets our desire for the authentic’ (Ouelette and Murray 2009: 7), much of what appears on screen is carefully scripted, directed and edited. Although viewers are aware of this, their emotional engagement with the characters, to a large extent, hinges on their ability to suspend this awareness. Both cultural heritage makers and reality TV makers are thus faced with the challenge of convincing their audiences that what they see exists as given, prior to the process of making. How do they do this? And what happens when the real of African heritage and the real of reality TV come together in a single TV format? Secondly, this chapter’s focus on television also speaks to the volume’s overall concern with the affective-sensorial dimensions of heritage. Television is broadly considered a medium of sensory stimulation, and commercial television formats, especially, provide spectacle and thrill in response to audiences’ craving for ‘sensation’. The genre of reality television, above all, thrives on a combination of ‘sensation’ and ‘authenticity’, exploiting the sensationalism of the ‘real’ to attract mass audiences and generate advertising profits. In reality TV, the body is made to play a prominent role closely connected to perceptions of authenticity. As Amy West (2006: 3) writes in her study of the genre, ‘reality TV prioritizes sensory and affective experience over linguistic or cognitive response. This applies equally to the people represented on screen and those watching the screen at home’. Thus, the lead role in reality television goes to the ‘bodily confession’: both the emphasis on the bodily emissions of the people on screen (blood, sweat, but especially tears) as the definitive proof of the real and the effort to induce emotional response – that is, authenticity of ­experience – in viewers’ bodies (West 2006: 3). This focus on sensory and affective experience raises the question of what role the body, and in particular the affective-sensorial flows in bodyto-body and body-to-world encounters (Seigworth and Gregg 2010: 1–2; Hamilakis 2013: 109) play in the various understandings of authenticity that emerge from the merging of cultural heritage and reality TV in Ghana. Approaching the articulation between heritage and commercial media through a focus on corporeality, this chapter examines how the styling and performance of cultural heritage in a televised talent show may appeal to the body, the senses and the lived experience of audiences. It thus analyses the refashioning of local cultural traditions for television through embodied processes of learning, choreographing, styling and performing. It asks how the corporeal and sensational aspects of local performance genres intersect with the spectacle and affective qualities of reality TV in the commercial production of what TV Africa calls ‘our culture, our tradition’. First, I give a historical background to the connection between heritage and entertainment in the field of performing arts in Ghana. I discuss

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how in the context of post-independence heritage politics, the Ghana Dance Ensemble, and subsequently so-called ‘cultural troupes’, emerged as precursors to Omanye Aba. Such performance ensembles, I argue, exemplified a tension between a heritage discourse of ‘cultural essence’ and a heritage practice of ‘stylized performance’. The second section discusses the neo-liberal reform of the Ghanaian media and entertainment sector in the 1990s and the implications this has had for the staging and framing of cultural heritage. Most intriguing, in this context, is the recent revaluation of African heritage as an urban lifestyle and entertainment trend, with TV Africa as a case in point. The third section presents and analyses the Omanye Aba show and its ‘making of’ reality and heritage, paying particular attention to the multiple registers of authenticity in the show. What I have, in the title of this chapter, described as ‘Corpo-reality TV’ is analysed through the case of Omanye Aba, with a focus upon the pivotal role of the body and the senses in processes of heritage-making and perception. The sensory appeal and affective power of new heritage designs turns out to be vital to people’s appreciation of these forms as real and powerful and to their identification with them as really theirs. The commercialization of cultural heritage, through market-driven media formats, is not to be interpreted, I argue, as an emptying out of traditional cultural forms. Rather, it provides a new platform on which the power of the television medium, the energies of the body, and the aura of tradition synergize to tune up that traditional form to the desires and interests of globally oriented urban performers and audiences.

Cultural Heritage and Performing Arts in Ghana In Ghana, the concept of cultural heritage emerged in the context of the country’s transition to independence (attained in 1957). As such, it came to be lastingly tied to the nationalist framework of post-independence identity politics, within which it was employed and developed. At the core of this framework was Kwame Nkrumah’s interpretation of ‘the African personality’2 and his ideological struggle to overcome the people’s ‘colonial mentality’ and restore the identity and the humanity of Africans, on national as well as Pan-African levels.3 Nkrumah and his fellows used the notion of ‘cultural heritage’ to express the need to recover ‘authentic’ African selfhood by returning to the indigenous cultural traditions that colonialism had taught Africans to forget or reject. A rehabilitation of ethnic traditions, and especially traditional arts, that had been devalued as ‘backward’, ‘primitive’ or ‘uncivilized’ during the colonial era was seen as a prerequisite for moving ahead as an independent nation. The big challenge with which the young Ghanaian state was confronted, however, was to create a unified nation out of many different ethnic groups, each with their own specific traditions, art forms and memory practices.4 To solve this problem, the state developed the principle of ‘unity in diversity’ and sought to revive and

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propagate Ghana’s multiple ethnic traditions within a new national culture that transcended ethnic and religious divisions. This was a decolonizing project in the direct sense of the term, explicitly aimed at undoing the alienation caused by colonialism and restoring the African self. Tied to the idea of African personality, heritage was mobilized to ‘liberate Africa from the cultural entanglements of the West’ (July 1987: 181). This ‘cultural liberation’ implied that the origins of the cultural forms that came to be most valued as ‘African heritage’ were placed in an imaginary precolonial past. The aim was to build an ‘indigenous’ cultural repertoire that was free from European influence. The emphasis on an African essence and purity that was to be found in ethnic traditions, however, was somewhat at odds with the long history of cultural exchange between Africans and Europeans, which has had a strong impact on African art forms and the formation of ‘hybrid heritages’ (De Jong 2009), such as the traditions of highlife music and concert party theatre in Ghana. Notwithstanding this lively reality of ‘hybrid heritages’, a dichotomy of ‘African’ versus ‘European’ culture was reinforced that continues to frame much talk about culture and tradition in Ghana today (see also Woets, this volume). I write ‘reinforced’ because while the postcolonial heritage discourse strongly emphasized a break with the colonial legacy, the search for African heritage – and the cultural dichotomy it implied – shows more continuity with the colonial period than is often assumed. An objectified idea of African culture emerged as part of British Indirect Rule in the Gold Coast, which hinged on the idea that progress can only be realized if it is built on indigenous traditions (Shipley 2015: 25–52; Meyer 2015: 256–57). To prepare Africans for modernity, yet keep them in their subordinate place, the colonial regime stimulated educated Africans to remain attached to their ‘traditional past’. Colonial education thus included a strong emphasis on ‘tradition and culture’ (Coe 2006: 57–65), focused in particular on the study of ‘tribal’ dances, drumming and folklore, but also including ‘vernacular’ languages and visual arts (Woets 2011, this volume). The formation of an ‘African heritage’ as a collection of ethnic traditions that was to serve as a building block for progress had thus already begun during colonial times, stimulated by colonial institutions themselves. Though considered valuable for Africans and the basis of their ‘true identity’, African culture was viewed as essentially opposed and ultimately inferior to ‘European civilization’. A polarized, value-laden opposition between African authenticity and Western modernity was thus enforced that has proved remarkably resilient up until the present day.5 After independence, government officials, intellectuals and artists appropriated colonial, essentializing notions of African culture whilst reversing the colonial hierarchy of value (see also Mbembe 2002). Recounting the colonial past as destructive of that African culture, the recovery of heritage became the means for cure in an idiom of loss. Paradoxically, this search for an African essence in a precolonial past was closely associated with the

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appropriation of the institutions of the modern nation state as principal actors in defining cultural authenticity and facilitating the formation of a national cultural heritage. From the 1960s to the 1990s, this state-centrist, unity-in-diversity model determined cultural policy and it still informs the work of the National Commission on Culture.6 Although after Nkrumah’s time in office (1957–1966) his ideological promotion of African heritage lost some of its power, it was revived as ‘Sankofaism’ during the military regime of Jerry J. Rawlings (1981–1992). Appropriating and nationalizing the Akan Sankofa symbol, visualized as a bird looking backwards and translated as ‘go back and fetch it’, Rawlings re-advocated a return to the nation’s cultural heritage as part of a revived critique of European neocolonialism and cultural imperialism.7 In order to restore people’s identification with and pride in a cultural past under threat of being lost, the state unleashed a Cultural Revolution. This included setting up cultural centres across the country as well as a National Commission on Culture, supporting chiefs in the celebration of traditional cultural festivals, redesigning school curricula to include African cultural studies and ‘local’ languages, and stimulating cultural programming on Ghana Television. As happened in national heritage-making across West Africa (e.g. Ebron 2002; Apter 2005; Schulz 2007), an important role was assigned to the performing arts – theatre, music and dance – in retrieving and mediating past cultural forms to modern audiences. This was not only because of the centrality of music and dance in indigenous cultural life. As Paul Schauert (2015) suggests in his study of the Ghana Dance Ensemble (GDE), Nkrumah deliberately sought to make use of the affective power of music and dance to transcend political and social divisions. The unique ability of music and dance to connect people on the level of embodied experience was mobilized to stimulate a sense of African identity and unity among Ghana’s citizens. The Ghana Dance Ensemble (first called National Dance Company) was founded in 1962 as the resident group at the Institute of African Studies, which was itself established at the University of Ghana, Legon, with the purpose of ‘leading the effort to uncover Africa’s heritage and make the African aware of his rich heritage’ (Hagan 1993: 21). Led by ethnomusicologist Kwabena Nketia and dancer/choreographer Albert Mawere Opoku, the aim of the Ghana Dance Ensemble was to establish a repertoire of traditional dances and musical styles, selected from the variety of ethnic groups in Ghana and adapted to the modern context, designed to fit the theatre setting and the postcolonial project of forging a national identity. More than just a collection of ‘ethnic dances’, the GDE was to be an experimental ground for the creation of a new Ghanaian dance culture (Schramm 2000: 342). This implied not only that dances were disconnected from the specific ritual, religious, political, military or entertainment functions they had fulfilled within each ethnic group, it also required extensive aesthetic modifications of these dances: what Schauert (2015: 78ff) calls

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‘sensational staging’. Adapting ‘traditional dances’ to the aesthetic requirements and performance practice of the theatre stage, many dances had to be cut in length and choreographed. New rhythms and movements were included, the number of dancers was reduced, and a strict separation between dancers and audiences was enforced.8 With regard to the selection of dances, Schauert (ibid.: 59) noted a predominance of Dagomba and Ewe dances in the GDE’s repertoire. Contrasting with a predominance of Akan traditions in visual culture and state symbolism (De Witte and Meyer 2012; Senah 2013), Schauert suggests that the predilection for Dagomba and Ewe dances was for aesthetic reasons: more vigorous and energetic than most Akan dances, Dagomba and Ewe dances were better suited to the artistic spectacle expected on the theatre stage. Putting the power of music and dance to evoke affective experience at the service of creating a national, trans-ethnic sensibility in Ghanaians, the GDE made a point of requiring all dancers to learn and master the rhythms and dances of ethnic groups other than their own. Dancers also had to learn about the functions of the dances in their original context so as to know the meaning of the dances. This would facilitate their appreciation of the diversity of Ghana’s cultural heritage and stimulate a sense of unity across ethnic boundaries.9 ‘Unity in diversity’ was best produced via the body and the intellect together. This was also the approach behind the teaching of drumming and dancing in public schools, as Cati Coe (2006) observed in her study of Ghanaian schools. Cultural education during the Nkrumah years focused on teaching pupils about, and having them embody, the performance traditions of Ghana’s various ethnic groups so as to create a sense of identification with the nation. Engaging dancers and teachers of the Ghana Dance Ensemble, schools played a major role in spreading the new, state-driven ‘unity-in-diversity’ performance aesthetics. Organizing ‘cultural competitions’, schools also institutionalized a competition element in the performance of traditional culture. The Ghana Dance Ensemble’s institutionalized repertoire of ‘traditional Ghanaian dances’ has constituted a major influence on the emergence of so-called ‘cultural troupes’ throughout the country. As Boyer-Dry noted in his study of cultural troupes in contemporary Accra, although there are different types of neo-traditional drumming and dance ensembles and they have been influenced by many sources, all rely heavily upon the legacy of the Ghana Dance Ensemble (Boyer-Dry 2008).10 In particular, the performance of a repertoire of rhythms and dances from across different ethnic groups in the country, abstracted from their ‘original’ social, political or religious functions, has become a common practice among cultural troupes in Accra. This practice was boosted by the development of a tourist ­industry in Ghana during the 1990s. What is important to stress here is that in the making of a national cultural heritage, the Ghanaian state harnessed the affective power of

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music and dance for political and cultural self-definition. The formation of a national dance culture through the GDE and public schools implied selection, transformation, objectification, professionalization and nationalization of local performance traditions. Making the past available through particular symbolic markers and performances – including rhythms, dance moves, instruments, dress items and other objects – ‘heritage’ is the outcome of a creative process, and is thus ‘designed’ and ‘staged’. A tension thus exists between heritage discourse and heritage performance, and the different understandings of authenticity attached to each. While the ideological discourse of heritage places authenticity in the past, as a ‘cultural essence’ to be recovered and preserved, the stylized performance of this heritage comes to locate authenticity as much in artistic creativity and aesthetic power. This tension is central to the politics and aesthetics of cultural heritage in Ghana and, I will argue, is amplified by the merging of cultural heritage with commercial television formats such as the Omanye Aba show.

‘African Heritage’ on the Entertainment Market As discussed above, since independence to the 1990s, the Ghanaian state has acted as the main producer and guardian of cultural heritage, albeit with fluctuating vigour due to the different emphases of successive governments. This central role of the state changed significantly as Ghana returned to democratic rule in 1992 and increasingly moved towards neo-liberal economic policies. As a result, the formerly state-sponsored and state-controlled public sphere has since transformed into a liberalized and commercialized arena, accessible to a plurality of voices and actors. Although state cultural politics never went uncontested (De Witte and Meyer 2012), in the new public arena it has come under mounting pressure from a number of angles. The rise of Pentecostal churches in the 1990s, in particular, and their influence on public and popular culture has strongly undermined the appeal of ‘cultural heritage’ as a national identity project. Highly suspicious of the grounding of nationhood in what they perceive as ‘demonic’ cultural traditions (De Witte and Meyer 2012), these churches have made extensive use of the new opportunities for media access to articulate alternative formations of identity and belonging grounded in being ‘born again’ (Meyer 2004; De Witte 2008). The state’s increasing responsiveness to Pentecostalism’s popularity among a large section of the electorate, particularly in the south, went hand in hand with its decreasing financial support for cultural heritage, and for traditional performing arts in particular. In this context, Pentecostal churches have emerged as major players in the culture and entertainment industry, training, sponsoring and facilitating gospel musicians, music and theatre groups (Collins 2004). At the same time, in the field of entertainment more generally, there has been a marked shift away from live performing arts towards mass

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media entertainment. The opening up of the media and the shift from state control to market forces has led to an influx of foreign productions. Private TV stations broadcast mostly foreign programming or international programme formats, thus answering to and at the same time feeding young people’s desire for Western things and styles. In local media production, multinational corporate sponsorship has come to play a key role (Thalén 2011). These trends in the field of entertainment – Pentecostalization, mass mediatization, commercialization and globalization – made it hard for ‘traditional’ performing arts to survive. As Jesse Shipley (2013) observed in the 1990s, most urban Ghanaian youth felt that traditional music was old-fashioned and boring, or ‘colo’ (from ‘colonial’). Rather, hiplife, a Ghanaian, transnationally circulating form of hip hop, appeals to the rapidly growing young urban population through its cosmopolitan aura and association with consumerist lifestyles. As a result of the neo-liberal changes in the means of production and distribution of music, and the mass popularity of hiplife among young urban Ghanaians, performance opportunities for traditional musicians have decreased significantly (Boyer-Dry 2008). Recently, however, a new trend towards celebrating ‘African heritage’ can be observed among young urbanites and in urban popular culture and media, in part stimulated by African-American and other diasporic adoptions of African styles. One of the places where this development becomes particularly visible is the privately owned TV station TV Africa. Founded by famous Ghanaian filmmaker Kwaw Ansah, it has been broadcasting since 2003, under the slogans ‘TV Africa: Truly African, Proudly Ghanaian’ and ‘projecting African values’. In an interview, Ansah told me that ‘in today’s global media environment, which is generally hostile to the African image’, the station’s mission to ‘uplift and enhance the soul and image of the African, both on the continent and in the diaspora’, becomes all the more urgent. ‘We have to restore the confidence of the African’, he said, by ‘turning round to see what has gone wrong and use the goodness in what our ancestors left us’. The echo of Sankofaism resounds strongly here. Indeed, the retrieval of African heritage in order to decolonize the African mind has been an important theme in Ansah’s films, most explicitly in Heritage Africa (1988).11 At the TV Africa compound, partly designed as an exhibition space for African art and traditional artefacts (including the bronze pot used in the film Heritage Africa), the figure of the Sankofa bird is also omnipresent: as an artwork decorating the fence wall, in the wood carvings on door panels and furniture and on wall hangings in stairways and offices. What makes TV Africa’s promotion of African heritage different from earlier Sankofaism, however, is its redesign and expression of African heritage as part of an explicit branding and marketing strategy. As its glossy marketing brochure declares, TV Africa’s ‘brand has been made to look indigenous … to target a particular niche of the market’, namely ‘those who have an African lifestyle and taste for African products’. This indigenous brand design is visible, for instance, in the set designs, which use a

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Figure 6.1  TV Africa studio set, decorated with Fang masks from Gabon and Shona sadza batik from Zimbabwe. Photo by the author.

variety of visual arts and artefacts that Ansah has collected from across Africa (Figure 6.1); in the dress policy, which requires presenters to always appear in ‘African’ attire; in PR materials and screen graphics; as well as in the station’s brand colours of black and gold, with black signifying the people of Africa and gold the continent’s mineral and cultural wealth. With TV Africa, African heritage thus becomes a matter of brand distinction, of lifestyle and taste, to be made available as a product on a diversified media market. A few years earlier, the idea of a commercial TV station that put African heritage at the forefront of its branding would have been unthinkable, Kwaw Ansah told me; such was the general craving for things Western and the dislike of things African. Today there is a growing market for things African, especially so among the young urban middle classes, who are looking for new, ‘Afropolitan’ ways to express an ‘African’ identity (see De Witte and Spronk 2014). Building on earlier Sankofaism, but departing from its overt political moralism, this rising generation dons African authenticity and national pride – ‘truly African, proudly Ghanaian’  – in style, fashion and aesthetic pleasure. This shift from Sankofaism to what we might call post-Sankofaism is also reflected in TV Africa’s programme content. Among the station’s home-produced ‘heritage-geared’ programmes are talent shows like Amazing Child, in which children from various parts of Ghana ‘exhibit

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their impeccable knowledge on culture and heritage in grand style’; game shows like Knowing Africa, in which high school pupils answer questions about African history and culture; and lifestyle programmes such as African Kitchen, which ‘seeks to re-discover the healthy foods that kept our forebears healthy’. Clearly, the educational aim that characterized state Sankofaism has not disappeared. The lead role has shifted, however, from heritage professionals to ordinary people as mediators of heritage. Whereas, from the 1980s to the late 1990s, Ghana Television’s weekly talk show Cultural Heritage hosted culture experts to educate ordinary citizens on the meaning and value of selected heritage items (e.g. ‘traditional religion’, ‘cultural festivals’, ‘libation’) in order to prevent them from drifting away from ‘their own’ culture, TV Africa has ‘ordinary people’ themselves bring their knowledge, culture and traditions on TV. Moreover, it repackages heritage in popular formats derived from global media culture that emphasize pleasure and excitement, feature competition and stimulate live audience participation such as text message voting or calling in to the shows. The Omanye Aba talent show was a vibrant example of this shift.

The Kasapreko Omanye Aba Show ‘Reigniting our Culture as a People’ ‘Omanye Aba’ is a ritual acclamation in the Ga language, meaning ‘may a good omen come’, used on occasions such as libation prayers. The idea for the Omanye Aba show came as a direct response to a business request. In an interview at his office, Yaw of F&B Media Consult Limited, the company that developed the show, told me how it started: We were looking for sponsorship for Just Like You [a reality show in which participants imitate global celebrities] and we happened to go to Kasapreko. We gave them a proposal for Just Like You and then they were like ‘our budget is tight, but in future we would like to do something with you. So, if you can think of something that will sync with our product’ and all that. So, we came back and we sat at our desk, me and my boss, and we came up with this idea.

Over the twenty-five years of its operation, the alcoholic drink producer Kasapreko Company Limited has firmly connected its brand identity to ‘tradition and culture’ (Makura 2008). Strong alcoholic drinks, locally produced or imported from abroad (in particular schnapps gin from the Netherlands), play a key role in traditional ritual and royal culture (Van den Bersselaar 2007). The name Kasapreko derives from Akan royal nomenclature (meaning ‘he who speaks once and for all’) and the company has been a major sponsor of royal and other traditional festivals throughout the country. The idea F&B had for Kasapreko was to find an ‘indigenous’

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alternative to all those global talent shows where people mimic foreign stars like Michael Jackson. Yaw: The person may have a talent, right, but I would like to look at it from what the person really has; what we as a nation or we as a continent have. Because you cannot go and market somebody’s product whilst you also have your own product which you can market. Even though global … foreign traditions … I am not saying it is bad, because foreign traditions and culture, be as it may, will always … liaise with whatever we are doing. But to relegate yours entirely and then swallow somebody’s and try to be the person which you are not, I think it is totally out of place. So, we saw that, OK, we have these traditions and cultures, rich, because … you know, when it comes to festival, the things that we do is unique: one, it is entertaining; two, it teaches a whole lot of things, because you would have to know your history. Nobody … you cannot forget your history; otherwise you wouldn’t know where you are coming from and where you are going.

The concern, then, was with African authenticity: ‘our own’ as more authentic than ‘foreign traditions and culture’, ‘somebody’s’. This concern is firmly situated in the longstanding dualist discursive framework outlined above, which posits ‘African’ against ‘foreign’ or ‘Western’ and within which many discussions about culture in Ghana are still framed. The format that F&B Consult proposed to Kasapreko was a weekly live talent show featuring a competition between eight cultural troupes in the well-known globalized reality TV format of an elimination contest. Each week, the groups would study, rehearse and perform assigned aspects of their community’s cultural heritage. A panel of cultural specialists would judge their live performance and the viewing audience would vote by text message for their favourite group so as to eliminate one group each week until only one remained and was declared the winner. Kasapreko was very happy with the concept and marketing manager Andrew Akolaa proudly launched the maiden show: Our eminent judges, friends, we are happy to be here to launch the initial version of what we will call a journey through the traditions. As you are aware, Kasapreko is tradition-grounded and our gin is ‘our tradition, our gin’ [Kasapreko’s slogan]. The concept of Omanye Aba, put together by F&B and Kasapreko company, and supported by TV Africa and Obonu FM, is to regenerate and reignite our culture as a people. And this is going to take us through the traditions of various traditional areas. We are starting with the Ga community.12 And we are very sure in the next eight weeks we are able to reignite the Ga culture … Ladies and gentlemen, you are welcome, sit back, and enjoy!

This concept of ‘reigniting our culture as a people’ was summarized and continuously repeated by the programme slogan: ‘our culture, our music, our tradition’. But who was this ‘us’? Who was called to identify with the particular performances of heritage on the TV studio stage and the TV screen was a question that was deliberately left implicit and open to multiple interpretations. Various levels of ‘us’ intersected. First, the ‘African

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Figure 6.2  Nungua Cultural Troupe performing at Omanya Aba. Photo by the author.

us’ – that is, as discussed above, strongly reflected in TV Africa’s overall recourse to ‘African heritage’ defined against ‘Western culture’ and closely related to the ‘us’ of Nkrumah’s ‘African personality’. Then there was the ‘Ghanaian us’ that resonated in the references, discursively as well as aesthetically, to the multiple traditions that make up Ghana’s national heritage, in Sankofaist ‘unity in diversity’ fashion. Of course, Omanye Aba’s very title, its explicit focus on ‘the Ga people’, its use of the Ga language (mixed with English) and presentation of Ga music, dances and songs, and stories, strongly appealed to an ethnicized, if explicitly diversified, Ga heritage: an appeal diametrically opposed to Nkrumah’s anti-ethnicist stance. But the strongest identification with particular groups and most enthusiastic support was based on local community affiliation: Teshie, Nungua, Osu, etc. This identification was stimulated by the competition format that pitted communities against each other. What yielded most excitement was exactly the crossing of such spatial levels of ‘us’: the insertion of the most local particularity, ‘one’s very own’, into a national space of circulation and viewership (cf. Lentz 2001) as well as into global frameworks of reference and valuation. It was in this regard that TV Africa, as an institution and a site, was a veritable ‘place of media power’ (Couldry 2000) for those who flocked to its compound. On 9 May 2010, I attended a live show in the TV Africa studio.

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As I arrived, I found the premises crowded with young men and women. Drums were being unloaded from buses and cars. People forced their way through the doors of the Akua Boatemaa studio, so named after the wife of TV Africa’s founder Kwaw Ansah. Inside, they fought over the best seats, some chairs being shared. ‘Traditional’ Ga music (Wulomei) sounded, people sang along. The atmosphere was exuberant. Video clips played on the large screen facing the audience. The set was branded Kasapreko with its brand colours – red and yellow, and large panels depicted the company logo: a bottle of Kasepreko Dry Gin and a traditionally clad musician playing the seperewa (an Akan harp-lute). After the opening act by the Adabraka Drama Group, all wearing Kasapreko T-shirts, the programme signature tune sounded: ‘Iiiit’s big: It’s our culture, our music, our tradition …’ The host, radio DJ Surely, of Obonu FM, a popular Ga station in Accra, entered the stage, dressed in a stylish modern ‘African’ outfit. Ladies and gentlemen! This is Kasapreko Omanye Aba, the reality show of the moment, the show that digs deep into our culture to bring the hidden facts to bear. Today we are doing the various dances and drumming that identify the communities in this competition.

This was the seventh week of the show: three communities had already been evicted during the previous shows; five were still in the running: Teshie, Chorkor, Nungua, Ada and Tema. After that day’s show, three of them would continue to the next week’s finals. All groups had brought their own supporters into the studio and as each drumming and dance group came on, their supporters greeted them rapturously, building up the intensity of the vibe within the studio. Far from being perceived as dull or ‘colo’, the traditional rhythms and dance moves easily fired the enthusiasm of the young people in the studio. After an hour and a half of performances – some electrifying, some less  spirited – alternating with assessments by the three judges (about which more below) and repeated calls to the TV audience to text their preference, Teshie, Tema and Nungua made it to the finals. The audience went wild; the studio crew could hardly control the crowd as people dashed upon the stage. Afterwards, drumming and dancing continued outside on the street in front of TV Africa as the groups and their supporters waited for their buses to take them home. One of the Nungua dancers had his picture taken in his dance costume in front of the TV Africa main entrance – later he posted it as the profile picture on his Facebook page, together with a statement ‘about myself’: ‘I love my African image; it comes with a rich history and natural powers’. Then he changed into his everyday clothes and joined his friends at the after-party on the street (Figure 6.3). The Chorkor people were silent; they had lost. The three groups  who  had  ­progressed  celebrated  their victories and continued to drum and sing on the bus home. Next week, one of them would win the contest.

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Figure 6.3  Drumming and dancing continues on the street. Photo by the author.

From the Stool House to the TV Studio To explore the various senses of authenticity as they emerged in the Omanye Aba show, let us first take a closer look at the production process. In their selection of participating cultural troupes, the producers did not follow the established recruitment procedure of publishing a call for participants and organizing an audition. Instead, they chose to involve the traditional authorities, the community chiefs.13 Yaw explained this choice thus: when you have groups from the community come and audition, then that group does not comprise of the indigenes. Then you have an Akan who has lived in Teshie for so, so, so long … and then he forms a cultural group, and then eventually, when he auditions and he is good, he may not be the … how should I put it, he may not be the original … he might not be able to present the original. That is why we chose to use the Stool House, had them nominate people or groups. Because all of the stool houses … they not really called groups to represent them, but rather they constituted themselves into a group. Every stool house has their drummers and their dancers.

Moving away from the well-established tradition, started by the Ghana Dance Ensemble, of performing dances from ethnic groups other than one’s own, involving the traditional authorities (the ‘stool houses’) in the selection procedure, was a way of ensuring the ‘authenticity’ of the

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participants – being true ‘indigenes’ and therefore able to ‘present the original’. Furthermore, recruiting through the traditional authorities would ensure the participants had privileged access to traditional knowledge and folklore. Marleen: I think not all the people in the groups know all this. They are young people. So how do they know all about this history, the tradition and all that? Yaw: That is why what we did was that we did not just choose groups. You have various cultural groups within the communities. But we chose to use the traditional authorities, the stool houses. So, letters were sent to the various stool houses. So, they select a group of people to represent them. So … when they need any information, the stool house is there to guide them, because they are the custodians of the family and the community history and all that. So, all they have to do is to go to them … Because we wanted to present the true form of their culture and customs. Undiluted from the stool houses … Undiluted … what does it mean? M: Y:  Unadulterated. Pure. You know, coming from the Stool House. Because if it is coming from the Stool House, they are the embodiment of Teshie.

The show’s concept thus placed a strong emphasis on the ‘true form of culture’, understood as ‘pure and undiluted’. Capitalizing on the widespread sentiment that the spiritual essence and power of chieftaincy, and by extension the community’s cultural heritage, lies in the sacred ‘black stool’ (Senah 2013), it authorized the stool houses as the locus of the most authentic cultural knowledge, and the chiefs as not only the guardians of that knowledge but also ‘the embodiment’ of the community.14 Requesting that the participants to the show should be ‘true indigenes’ of the community in order to be able to access and present ‘the original’, the concept thus posited an inherited connection, guaranteed by biological ancestry, to this ‘true form of culture’. Two things complicate this claim to representing an authentic essence: first, the historical fact that chieftaincy was instituted in Ga society as part of British colonial Indirect Rule (see Note 16); second, the prevalent idea that the sacred essence of tradition, preserved in stool houses and shrines, always eludes straightforward re-presentation outside restricted ritual contexts (see De Witte 2005); in other words, that the cultural essence to which the show alluded would inevitably be lost when presented in the show. This did not matter to the participants. Nor did the fact that this form of culture as ‘kept’ in the stool houses was actually quite far removed from their daily life diminish their perception of its authenticity. On the contrary, this distance, and the necessary efforts of participants to overcome it, rather added to the authenticity of the traditions on display, and was explicitly built in through the format of weekly learning assignments. Every Monday after the show, the group leaders would receive an assignment from the show’s producers. The groups would then have one week to do research on the topic and prepare a performance for the following

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Sunday. Assignments included ‘town history’, ‘festivals’, ‘royal funeral rites’, ‘marriage rites’, ‘traditional dance’ and ‘folklore’. Although the groups’ research and learning activities were not made part of the broadcast (due to lack of resources, I was told), their having to make an effort to learn something about ‘their’ heritage that they did not know, and that most of the audience would not know, was an important factor that, as it turned out, contributed to the sense of excitement and expectation on the part of audiences. As one of the Teshie supporters I met in the studio told me enthusiastically: they have to go very deep to learn all these details. Even the group leader may not know. So, he has to visit his elders, with some drink [as is customary], so that they teach him. And then he has to teach the group, even before they start the rehearsals.

This having to go ‘deep’ to search for the ‘undiluted truth’ from the royal houses, access to which is restricted and surrounded with ritual action (presenting drinks to the elders), gave the performances a persuasive feel of authenticity and sanctity for participants and audiences alike. At the same time, Yaw emphasized that the show seeks to ‘demystify’ royal customs and traditions, in particular with respect to royal funeral rites: We are seeking to demystify, you know, customs and traditions, because in Akyem Abuakwa for instance … Osagyefuo Amoatia Ofori Panyin [the reigning chief of Akyem Abuakwa], you know, there is this issue about Kuntunkunu [his predecessor, who died in 1999], I don’t know whether you have gone there. When the King dies, people will die, they slaughter people. It is some sort of mystery, it has phased out. I think it used to be in those times with Tweneboa Kodua, you know those times where they valued human sacrifice. But now, because most of the kings themselves have been educated, they have been through the system, they know that all those things is rubbish. So, it not really plays a major role in this date … M: But still there is some mystery around chieftaincy … Y: It is mystery, that is why we have to demystify it! Because … like what happens when the King dies, people tell us what goes on during the funeral. As we progress, we introduce a whole lot of things, because some of them are subtle. And gradually, as the thing warms up into the heart and soul of people, you get a lot of people.

Yaw’s exclamation that ‘we have to demystify it’ points to a broader tension present in the project of ‘reigniting’ cultural traditions, especially those connected to chieftaincy: the widespread belief in the presence and power of spirits in things ancestral, a belief that is reinforced by the dominance of Pentecostalism (see De Witte and Meyer 2012).15 For many, this ancestral power, this ‘mystery’, is threatening, something to keep away from. So, in order for the thing to ‘warm up into the heart and soul of people’, and thus

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be commercially viable, tradition has to be made ‘safe’ for consumption – that is, disconnected from the power of spirits and their ritual demands, which, in Yaw’s view, ‘is rubbish’. At the same time, however, the show also flirts with this mystical power by inviting its representatives par excellence, Ga traditional spiritual authorities, into the studio as members of the board of judges. Apart from two permanent judges – well-known musician and ‘traditionalist’ Amandzeba (whose name means ‘child of tradition’ in Fante) and leading actor and TV personality Ata Mensah, famous for his role in the longstanding TV drama series Showcase in Ga and now leader of the Adabraka drama group – the third judge each week is a visiting judge, usually a wulәmә (male priest, pl. wulәmεi) or wәyoo (female priest, pl. wәyei), from one of the participating Ga communities (Figure 6.4).16 ‘You know, those who worship the idols’, one of the dancers explained to me matter-of-factly. With the strong influence of Pentecostalism on urban publics, ‘those who worship the idols’ have become controversial figures, widely perceived as connected to the dangerous presence of spirit forces (De Witte 2015). Incorporating them into the programme format was not, then, a self-evident move. During the maiden broadcast, the Chorkor wulәmә Numo Bo Dai III was present in the studio to judge the performance and to open the

Figure 6.4  Numo Sakumo Wәyoo, priestess of Sakumo, in the Omanye Aba studio. Photo by the author.

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show. After the host had introduced the three judges, he said: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is a traditional thing. So, it is about time for me to invite Numo Bo Dai to start the show by offering libation to the gods’. Applause followed as Numo entered the stage, rearranged his white ntoma, took two bottles of Kasapreko Dry Gin and poured libation on the red carpet. ‘The gods’ were thus explicitly invoked, but they were not further named or specified and the rapid pace of the show left little room for an elaborate libation prayer. This was no problem to the audience members around me, who were neither interested in nor familiar with particular gods or proper ritual speech (which I asked them about), but excited about ‘the real thing’ being done right here in the TV studio. To them, the wulәmә’s performance embodied this ‘real thing’ of traditional religion. But the entertainment format also ‘tamed’ the real, making it ‘safe’ for consumption and enjoyment. Exactly this latter aspect, however, also evoked fierce criticisms of the show, and TV Africa at large, especially from more radical traditionalists, who rejected this as shallow entertainment, devoid of the ‘real power’ of traditional religion and corrupted by Western-styled commercial formats and the love for money.

Essence and Spice A similar tension between the authenticity of particular traditions and the requirements of the television format pertained to the dance performances. What was needed to capture a TV audience was first of all spectacle and speed. I talked about this with Edmund, one of the dancers of the Nungua group, who would eventually win the contest. Leaders learn from the palace, they write down how to go about the thing. Then you make it into a choreography. Because you have to make it more spicy, for the people to enjoy. There is creativity involved. For the first programme, we had to research into the history of our town, Nungua, and then put this history into a choreography, to make it exciting.

So, with all the emphasis on an ‘authentic essence’ that was to be found in the chiefs’ palaces and the wulәmεi’s shrines, vital for this essence to excite the audience within the limited time slot of a few minutes was ‘spice’: good, ‘spicy’ choreography. And adding spice, Edmund stressed, required a great deal of creativity, artistic ability and plain hard training. ‘Choreography’, then, denotes a form of heritage design that foregrounds the corporeal as well as the creative dimensions of the process. It acknowledges the need to persuade audiences, a need that is part of all heritage-making (as discussed in the introduction to this volume). The body is the main working material here. A such, the visual design of the body and its decorations are important. The bare feet and chests, the body paintings, the kente loin cloths and head wraps, and the bead necklaces and cowrie shell leg bands of the Nungua dancers (Figure 6.2) come to symbolize

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an ‘African tribal past’ and visualize the show’s heritage narrative.17 But more than body imagery, most important in a dance performance is, of course, the moving body. And it is into moving the body that most of the work of making and rehearsing a choreography goes: refining dance moves, synchronization, balancing collective and individual movements and ­sharpening communication between bodies. At the core of this is rhythm. Ga traditional dances, like West African dance more broadly, are characterized by an aesthetics of persuasion that is driven by rhythm. That is: their persuasiveness hinges on the intimate interplay between drumming and dancing, the communication between drummers and dancers, sound and movement. Francesca Castaldi, in her study of the Senegalese national ballet (2006: 4), stresses the relationship between the aural and the kinetic as one of the constitutive elements of ‘traditional African dance’-making and delivery and proposes that choreography is the organizing principle of this relationship. Persuasive choreography, then, produces a synergy between aural rhythm and kinetic rhythm that captivates the audience, a performance that is both powerful and pleasurable – ‘spicy’. The body, in all its sensory dimensions, produces an aesthetic pleasure in ‘African tradition’ and in ‘being African’ that is hard to resist. So, staging ‘traditions for you to savour and enjoy’, as the programme jingle markets it, Omanye Aba is not primarily about learning and knowing about these traditions, or about watching them in a restricted ocularcentric sense often associated with television as a visual medium: the invitation is first of all to feel the power of tradition and indulge in its pleasure. This invitation also emerged in the judges’ comments on the performances. In general, the judges said very little along the lines of the show’s master narrative of ‘reigniting our culture as a people’, but focused their comments on what the performances did to them. The first commentator on Nungua’s performance about their town history, actor Ata Mensah, for example, said only ‘Well done’, then remained silent for a long period before nodding his head and finally saying: ‘I have nothing to say’, thus expressing that the performance rendered him speechless, was beyond words. Musician Amandzeba said: ‘As for this, this is sweet water, Nungua’, thus turning the just-performed narrative about how the name Nungua means ‘sweet water’– an important element in the Nungua people’s migration and settlement history – into a comment on the flavour and flow of the dance performance. Wulәmә Numo Bo Dai, finally, said: ‘I am so impressed; the way they danced gave me goose pimples’. An involuntary bodily response, the wulәmә’s goose pimples not only served as evidence of the power of tradition, but, selected by him as the most relevant experience, also served as a model for what audiences, in the studio and at home, were supposed to feel. The intensity of the dance, rhythms and music, and the intensity of feeling it evokes, made manifest by bodily responses such as goose pimples

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(as is typical of the real of reality television in general, see West 2006: 29), here comes to authenticate cultural narratives of place, history, self and being. Feeling it in the body makes it real. It is clear that TV is not merely an audiovisual medium, but, as Marshall McLuhan posited, appeals as much to the sense of feeling, of being touched and moved.18 This is especially (but certainly not only!) so for the reality TV genre. It is this that I call Corpo-reality TV: the sense of authenticity that, conveyed by a television show, comes to be located in the body. Or, more precisely, that is produced through a resonance of energy between bodies on stage and bodies in the studio, and between bodies on screen and viewers’ bodies off screen.19 The bodily real of the performers and the spectators thus becomes the anchor point to which narratives, in this case narratives of reignition of community heritage and African tradition, are tethered.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have taken TV Africa’s Omanye Aba talent show as a lens through which to view recent shifts in engagement with cultural heritage in urban Ghana. As private TV stations, commercial producers and corporate programme sponsors enter where the state has increasingly retreated from its role of heritage maker, programs like Omanye Aba present a new form of market-based heritage design, in which young urban populations enthusiastically take part. The show’s concept of ‘reigniting our culture as a people’ in the global format of a reality talent contest may be seen as the youngest shoot on Ghana’s heritage tree. I have shown how the long genealogy of forming and transmitting a national cultural heritage that harks back to colonial days still reverberates in TV Africa. With reality formats like Omanye Aba, however, it also branches off in distinctly new directions that reanimate the past as a source of cultural subjectivity and collective self-worth among urban audiences. How is it that young people, oriented towards and at home in global entertainment culture, come to experience distinctly local, ethnic traditions as genuinely theirs? What is it that ‘reignites’ such traditions as real and relevant in their lives, as powerful in the world? What narratives and experiences of belonging and authenticity are born from the merger of cultural heritage and commercial reality television? And what can they tell us about the larger dynamics of cultural belonging and self-presentation in the current age of neo-liberal globalization? The analysis of the making of Omanye Aba revealed different, and in fact opposing, ‘authenticity arguments’ at work. Built into the concept of the show and present in its speech was an essentialist mode of discursive argumentation, based on longstanding tropes of ‘African authenticity’. Authorizing the stool houses and the traditional authorities (chiefs and wulәmεi) as embodiments of cultural continuity with a precolonial past, the show drew strongly on long-established (colonial) ideas of cultural

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identity as given, on cultural authenticity as ethnic purity. Interestingly, the ‘research’ built into the assignments was not only to ensure that what the dance groups put on stage was ‘really’ their community’s cultural heritage. More important perhaps was the entertainment value of the urban participants’ cultural distance from this ‘real tradition’, their unfamiliarity with it and the efforts that were necessary for them to access it and make it their own: the thrill of young people going ‘deep’ to dig up something hidden. 20 A different, anti-essentialist ‘authenticity argument’ was evident in the practices and experiences of the dancers, studio audiences and the judges. This was a corporeal mode of argumentation about authenticity as located in the body and emerging in the ‘affective moment’: in the multisensorial experience of the dancing body in creative performance and in bodily engagement with the performances on the part of the audience. ‘Spicy’ choreography and artistic prowess, manifest in the effective interplay of aural and kinetic rhythm, were key to evoking an intensity of feeling and stimulating the studio audience’s emotional identification with the performances. In engaging with the performances in the Omanye Aba studio, then, a cerebral connection to heritage, mediated by the show’s narrative and discourse, and a sensual connection to heritage, mediated by the bodies of performers and spectators, merge to produce in subjects a spontaneous and momentary ‘sense of essence’. This conjoining of cognitive and affective registers was already explicit in Nkrumah’s nationalist project of heritage-making, which purposely mobilized corporeal technologies of cultural memory and sought to embody the postcolonial nation’s cultural heritage in music and dance. A strong connection was thus created between cultural heritage and the performing arts, especially music and dance, and ‘cultural troupes’ emerged as recognized mediators of heritage. Placing this tradition of cultural troupes into the global reality TV format of a competition-based talent show, Omanye Aba capitalized on and reconfigured a complex web of values, interests, appetites, sensibilities and desires. Several aspects of this reconfiguration are worth mentioning here. First, the new regimes of value that come with the democratization and commercialization of heritage formation (see De Jong 2007). Ultimately, the discourse of heritage is a discourse of value, about what elements of the past are valuable and worthy of preservation. With the withering of state control over heritage comes a shift from the power of state institutions to define what is valuable to the power of media, in this case television, to define what is worthy of people’s attention. In the current age, media power merges with the power of the market and thus with media audiences, as consumers of media content, to create value. Reality formats in particular allow ‘ordinary people’ to authorize what is valuable: as expert performers, as studio audiences, as assessors at home voting for the best act. Established markers of cultural value and authority, such as local

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chiefs, as repositories of their people’s history, thus become subsumed under a regime of value that emphasizes entertainment value, ‘spicy’ performance and emotional and visceral engagement. Such new regimes of value tie into a politics of appearance and recognition (Schulz 2007) that provides local groups and individuals with opportunities for the reignition of tradition. This resonates with Ferdinand de Jong’s (2007) demonstration with regards to the incorporation of new media in Senegalese masquerade performance, which offer new ways of authenticating and re-enchanting performance traditions, but whose regimes of visibility and commodification may at the same time contradict the older regimes of value that the performance invokes. Secondly, the scope of these new politics of recognition and regimes of value is at once local, national and global, thus moving the spatial framework of heritage away from a primary emphasis on identification with a state-composed canon of national culture to a simultaneous emphasis on the particularity of the most local and its relevance in a global frame of reference. Although Omanye Aba was not broadcast beyond Ghana, it explicitly derived its concept from, and placed itself within, the context of global circulation of television formats and content, as a culturally authentic (‘our own’) alternative to foreign talent shows. The participants’ work to, first, discover a heritage unique to, say, the Nungua community, and then to project this unique Nunguaness into national and global spaces of television entertainment, appeared as a powerful resource for refashioning cultural belonging and reanimating collective self-esteem. In the framework of the show, a connection to localized community traditions is sought, redesigned, embodied and publicized as part of an identity of being African in the world. So, if the production of heritage under state-centred Sankofaism grounded cultural authenticity in the ancestral past in a political, counter-colonial move to Africanize modern nationhood, new mediatized forms of heritage production emerging in today’s neo-liberal era evince a post-­Sankofaism that, even if it may echo earlier concerns with cultural alienation and loss, embraces global media culture as a space in which to market cultural uniqueness as a resource for new forms of self-definition. Marketing the ‘rich traditions’ of places like Teshie, Nungua, and Prampram ‘for you to savour and enjoy’, these new forms centre notions of African authenticity on the aesthetic attraction of and pleasure in heritage as style rather than on heritage as a resource for normative political value. That is, they address audiences not as national citizens who must not forget their heritage lest they become alienated, but as consumers in a globalized identity market, who can be seduced to buy into ‘African heritage’ as a lifestyle option that is enjoyable, empowering and ‘truly African’. Style, design and branding are at the core of this process. In this shift, the body becomes an important instrument with which to sense things like ‘true Africanness’ and ‘the power of tradition’. My focus

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on a specific instance of reality television, and my notion of ‘corpo-reality TV’ to analyse the role of the body and the senses in making heritage productions ‘feel real’, lay bare a broader aesthetics of ‘corpo-real’ persuasion salient in the marketplace of cultural authenticity: the body comes to authenticate representations of culture and heritage through the intensity of feeling they seek to evoke. Designed to appeal to the senses and to be appropriated on the level of experience – ‘conjuring affect by aesthetic means’, to borrow John and Jean Comaroff’s phrase (2009: 16) – new heritage forms offer the possibility to sense the essence and power of the cultural past in the body, rather than apprehend it intellectually; they make people feel that the selected and redesigned cultural forms are an ‘authentic’ part of who they are; and they capitalize on that thrilling sense of connectedness and belonging that emerges in the moment of ­ingestion. 21 To be sure, this role of the body as a sensor of ‘real power’ is not new. In indigenous religious traditions, for instance, the body is the site of encounter with spirits, mediated by the affective power of drumming beats and rhythms. This is very similar in Pentecostalism, where bodily sensations, induced by music and sound, are taken as indicators of the presence of the Holy Spirit (De Witte 2011). This is why, in a Pentecostal rendering of indigenous spirits as dangerous and evil, traditional drumming becomes so problematic for many Christians. With the new modes of market-driven heritage design, traditional drumming rhythms, and the intensity of feeling they evoke, are ‘demystified’ by global entertainment formats that disconnect them from the power of local spirits and simultaneously ­reconnect this enchanting power to pleasure and pride in heritage. And to the empowerment of young people’s identities as Africans in and of the world. Marleen de Witte  is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. She has published widely on African Pentecostalism, African traditional religion, religion and media, globalization, the senses and the body, cultural heritage, popular culture, funerals, urban Africa (in particular Ghana) and Afro-Europe (in particular the Netherlands), including Long Live the Dead! Changing Funeral Celebrations in Asante, Ghana (Aksant  Academic Publishers, 2001);  Heritage and the Sacred  (special issue edited with Birgit Meyer,  Material Religion); and ’African’: A Contested Qualifier in Global Africa (special issue edited with Rachel Spronk, African Diaspora).

Notes The research on which this chapter is based was generously funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). I wish to thank my colleagues in the ‘Heritage Dynamics’ research project for their stimulating intellectual collaboration over

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the years and their helpful comments on my work. Special thanks to Birgit Meyer, Mattijs van de Port, and Ferdinand de Jong for their detailed feedback on an earlier version of this text.   1. In Ghanaian discourse, terms such as ‘tradition’, ‘culture’ and ‘heritage’ are used more or less interchangeably to refer to objects, practices, stories and knowledges imagined as rooted in a past before European contact.   2. The concept of African personality is often attributed to E.W. Blyden (e.g. PawlikováVilhanová 1998), one of the Pan-Africanist thinkers that inspired Nkrumah. Decolonial in its aims, Nkrumah’s idea of the African personality nevertheless espoused a European-derived, specifically Romantic model of cultural nationalism, infused with the Herderian idea that the ‘essence’ of a nation, the national character, lies in its distinct and unique cultural heritage. See also Hagan (1993).   3. From Kwame Nkrumah’s speech at independence on 6th March 1957: ‘We are going to demonstrate to the world, to other nations, that we are prepared to lay our own foundation … our own African identity. … we are going to create our own African personality and identity’.   4. Nkrumah’s stance towards ethnic traditions, and the chieftaincy institution in particular, was highly ambiguous, as he feared these could promote ethnic rivalry (‘tribalism’) and hamper progress.   5. Of course, this resilience does not mean that a colonial model of ‘civilizations’ survives unchanged. The imagined opposition between African authenticity and Western modernity is also broken down, for instance, by the valuation of hybrid local popular culture, including a very explicit valuation of African-American popular culture (see Shipley 2013).   6. The National Commission on Culture dedicated the 2004 Cultural Policy ‘to the people of Ghana for the promotion of unity in diversity’ and ‘to the lasting memory of our Ancestors and Forebears whose vision and relentless efforts bequeathed unto us the landmass of Ghana and its priceless heritage’ (National Commission on Culture 2004).   7. Originally, the symbol of a bird with its head turned back expressed the Twi proverb ‘worefi na wosankɔfa a, yεnkyi’ – it is no taboo to go back and fetch what you have forgotten, meaning one can always undo past mistakes.   8. In the beginning, the GDE’s adaptations, and the abstraction from culture as lived practice it implied, caused some concerns about the authenticity of the dances, as some people complained that they were not true to their original form. Over time, however, many Ghanaians came to accept and take pleasure in the new dance forms.   9. In interviews with Schauert, GDE dancers said that the ability to drum and dance across ethnic boundaries indeed resulted in increased feelings of national pride and national solidarity. Still, a strong ethnic affiliation remained and many dancers reported to ‘feel’ their own ethnic dances more than the other dances. 10. Another important influence is the long tradition of so-called concert parties, travelling theatre troupes that performed comic variety shows combining an eclectic array of music, dance and drama genres. See Collins (1994), Cole (2001). 11. For a discussion of Heritage Africa, see Meyer (1999). The film tells the story of a black colonial official’s painful alienation from his past and culture, and his eventual, dramatic reunification with his heritage – symbolized by a sacred family heirloom, an ancient bronze pot, that he had initially given away as an item of tribal art to his colonial master. In the spirit of Sankofaism, the heirloom that the protagonist had lost through colonial brainwashing could – and should – be retrieved so as to heal the wounds of colonial alienation. 12. The concept was not limited to Greater Accra, but aimed at dedicating one season’s edition to each of Ghana’s ten regions, so as to get winners in all the ten regions and

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then bring all the winners together in a grand finale. I have not been able to verify whether new editions have indeed been produced in other regions. 13. Involving the chiefs also meant that in selecting the eight communities (Ada, Prampram, Tema, Nungua, Teshie, Osu, Jamestown and Chorkor) from which the cultural troupes would be recruited, the producers had to be careful to avoid involvement in chieftaincy conflicts. ‘You know we have trouble spots within the chieftaincy, where we have groups fighting. So, we try to avoid. Because if you choose one over the other …’ 14. Literally, the ‘Stool House’ is the sacred room in a chief’s palace where the blackened stools of his deceased predecessors are kept. Through these black stools a chief links up spiritually with the ancestral spirits. It is in the black stool, the most sacred material object of chieftaincy, that the ‘essence’ of chieftaincy, and the community’s historical narrative, is perceived to lie (see Senah 2013). Hence the use of the term ‘Stool House’ here as a pars pro toto for the institution of chieftaincy as a whole. 15. Yaw’s emphasis on ‘demystification’ calls to mind Sekou Touré’s ‘demystification campaigns’ in post-independence Guinea (1958–1984), which attacked ‘fetishism’ and ‘any irrational attitude’ so as to consolidate a rational basis for the development of the people (Sarró 2007). 16. Ga society has two types of ‘traditional authority’. In precolonial times the wulәmεi were the rulers and they had a political and a spiritual function. In the context of interactions with the British, a system of chiefs (mantse) modelled on that of the Akan emerged. Chiefs were appointed to handle traditional politics and jurisdiction and wulәmεi to handle spiritual matters. 17. See Conklin (1997) on Amazonian Indian activists’ production of exotic body images in defining cultural authenticity for Western audiences. 18. In his famous Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan described television as ‘above all, an extension of the sense of touch … not so much a visual as a tactual-auditory medium, which includes all of our senses in an in-depth interaction’ (McLuhan 1966: 333–36). 19. More research would be needed to see how the screened performances indeed resonate with television audiences and ‘transmit feeling’. But see De Witte (2009) on the audiovisual mediation of divine touch in Ghanaian televangelism and Sobchack (2004) on the corporeal sensuality of the cinematic experience. 20. This essentialist trope of cultural authenticity that hinges on purity and, paradoxically, distance shows a remarkable similarity to the exploitation of cultural distance and the ‘exotic’ in Western ‘intercultural reality TV’ (‘ordinary people’ encountering so-called ‘primitive tribes’) (Kuppens and Mast 2013). 21. This conception of ‘sensing in the body’ resonates with John and Jean Comaroff’s (2009) analysis of new forms of ethnic culture as being ‘incorporated’, in the dual sense of being produced through the logics of corporate business and being easily embodied through affective attachment.

References Apter, A. 2005. The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Boyer-Dry, J. 2008. ‘Transforming Traditional Music in the Midst of Contemporary Change: The Survival of Cultural Troupes in Accra, Ghana’, BA Thesis. Wesleyan University. Castaldi, F. 2006. Choreographies of African Identities: Négritude, Dance, and the National Ballet of Senegal. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.

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Coe, C. 2006. Dilemmas of Culture in African Schools: Youth, Nationalism, and the Transformation of Knowledge. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cole, C.M. 2001. Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Collins, J. 1994. ‘The Ghanaian Concert Party: African Popular Entertainment at the Cross Roads’, PhD Dissertation. State University of New York at Buffalo. ———. 2004. ‘Ghanaian Christianity and Popular Entertainment: Full Circle’, History in Africa 31: 407–23. Comaroff, J. and J. Comaroff. 2009. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Conklin, B. 1997. ‘Body Paint Feathers and VCRs: Aesthetics and Authenticity in Amazonian Activism’, American Ethnologist 24(4): 711–37. Couldry, N. 2000. The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age. New York: Routledge. De Jong, F. 2007. ‘A Masterpiece of Masquerading: Contradictions of Conservation in Intangible Heritage’, in F. de Jong and M. Rowlands (eds), Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, pp. 161–84. ———. 2009. ‘Hybrid Heritage’, African Arts 42(4): 1–5. De Witte, M. 2005. ‘“Insight”, Secrecy, Beasts, and Beauty: Struggles over the Making of a Ghanaian Documentary on “African Traditional Religion”’, Postscripts 1(2/3): 277–300. ———. 2008. ‘Spirit Media: Charismatics, Traditionalists, and Mediation Practices in Ghana’, PhD Dissertation. University of Amsterdam. ———. 2009. ‘Modes of Binding, Moments of Bonding: Mediating Divine Touch in Ghanaian Pentecostalism and Traditionalism’, in B. Meyer (ed.), Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion, and the Senses. New York: Palgrave, pp. 183–205. ———. 2011. ‘Touched by the Spirit: Converting the Senses in a Ghanaian Charismatic Church’, Ethnos 76(4): 489–509. ———. 2015. ‘Media Afrikania: Styles and Strategies of Representing African Traditional Religion in Ghana’s Public Sphere’, in R. Hackett and B. Soares (eds), New Media and Religious Transformation in Africa. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 207–26. De Witte, M. and B. Meyer. 2012. ‘African Heritage Design: Entertainment Media and Visual Aesthetics in Ghana’, Civilisations 61(1): 43–64. De Witte, M. and R. Spronk. 2014. ‘Introduction: “African”, A Contested Qualifier in Global Africa’, African Diaspora 7(2): 165–76. Ebron, P. 2002. Performing Africa. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hagan, G.P. 1993. ‘Nkrumah’s Cultural Policy’, in K. Arhin (ed.), The Life and Work of Kwame Nkrumah. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, pp. 3–25.

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Hamilakis, Y. 2013. Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect. New York: Cambridge University Press. July, R. 1987. An African Voice: The Role of the Humanities in African Independence. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. 2004. ‘Intangible Heritage as Metacultural Production’, Museum International 56(1–2): 52–64. Kuppens, A.H. and J. Mast. 2013. ‘Ticket to the Tribes: Culture Shock and the “Exotic” in Intercultural Reality TV’, Media, Culture & Society 35(7): 799–814. Lentz, C. 2001. ‘Local Culture in the National Arena: The Politics of Cultural Festivals in Ghana’, African Studies Review 44(3): 47–72. Makura, M. 2008. Africa’s Greatest Entrepreneurs. Johannesburg: Penguin Books. Mbembe, A. 2002. ‘African Modes of Self-Writing’, Public Culture 14(1): 239–73. McLuhan, M. 1966. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. Meyer, B. 1999. ‘Popular Ghanaian Cinema and “African Heritage”’, Africa Today 46(2): 93–114. ———. 2004. ‘“Praise the Lord”: Popular Cinema and Pentecostalite Style in Ghana’s New Public Sphere’, American Ethnologist 31(1): 92–110. ———. 2015. Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. National Commission on Culture. 2004. ‘The Cultural Policy of Ghana’. Retrieved 13 November 2013 from http://www.artsinafrica.com/up loads/2011/04/Ghana.pdf. Ouelette, L. and S. Murray. 2009. ‘Introduction’, in S. Murray and L. Ouellette (eds), Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture. New York: New York University Press, pp. 1–22. Pawliková-Vilhanová, V. 1998. ‘The African Personality or the Dilemma of the Other and the Self in the Philosophy of Edward W. Blyden, ­1832–1912’, Asian and African Studies 7 (2): 162–75. Peterson, D., K. Gavua and C. Rassool (eds). 2015. The Politics of Heritage in Africa: Economies, Histories, and Infrastructures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rowlands, M. and F. de Jong. 2007. ‘Reconsidering Heritage and Memory’, in F. de Jong and M. Rowlands (eds), Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, pp. 13–29. Sarró, R. 2007. ‘Demystified Memories: The Politics of Heritage in PostSocialist Guinea’, in F. de Jong and M. Rowlands (eds), Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, pp. 215–29. Schauert, P. 2015. Staging Ghana: Artistry and Nationalism in State Dance Ensembles. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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Schramm, K. 2000. ‘The Politics of Dance: Changing Representations of the Nation in Ghana’, Africa Spectrum 35(3): 339–58. ———. 2004. ‘Senses of Authenticity: Chieftaincy and the Politics of Heritage in Ghana’, Etnofoor 17(1/2): 156–77. Schulz, D. 2007. ‘From a Glorious Past to the Lands of Origin: Media Consumption and Changing Narratives of Cultural Belonging in Mali’, in F. de Jong and M. Rowlands (eds), Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, pp. 185–213. Seigworth, G. and M. Gregg. 2010. ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, in M. Gregg and G. Seigworth (eds), The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–25. Senah, K. 2013. ‘Sacred Objects into State Symbols: The Material Culture of Chieftaincy in the Making of a National Political Heritage in Ghana’, Material Religion 9(3): 350–69. Shipley, J. 2013. Living the Hiplife: Celebrity and Entrepreneurship in Ghanaian Popular Music. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2015. Trickster Theatre: The Poetics of Freedom in Urban Africa. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Sobchack, V.C. 2004. ‘What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh’, in V. Sobchack (ed.), Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 53–84. Thalén, O. 2011. ‘Ghanaian Entertainment Brokers: Urban Change, and Afro-Cosmopolitanism, with Neoliberal Reform’, Journal of African Media Studies 3(2): 227–40. Van den Bersselaar, D. 2007. The King of Drinks: Schnapps Gin from Modernity to Tradition. Leiden: Brill. West, A. 2006. ‘Here & Now: Intimacy, Immediacy and Authenticity in New Zealand’s Reality Television’, PhD Dissertation. University of Auckland. Woets, R. 2011. ‘What is This? Framing Ghanaian Art from the Colonial Encounter to the Present’, PhD Dissertation. VU University, Amsterdam.

7 ‘Heated Discussions Are Necessary’

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The Creative Engagement with Sankofa in Modern Ghanaian Art

Rhoda Woets

In September 2007, I landed in Ghana’s capital city, Accra, to conduct research on visual artists who are part of an institutionalized framework of galleries and cultural institutions. Every beginning is difficult and to kick-start my fieldwork, I took a tour around Accra’s galleries and open-air craft markets to get a general impression of what ‘Ghanaian art’ looks like. It struck me that in each different segment of the art market artists had portrayed cultural themes in both rural and urban environments. First of all, there were paintings that depicted subject matter that, over time, had become signifiers of a Ghanaian or African precolonial heritage. To list just a few of these recurring themes: fertility statues, chiefs in full regalia, villages with clay huts and baobab trees, elongated female figures carrying baskets on their heads, cheerful dancers with drums, Adinkra symbols and palmtree beaches sprinkled with dug-out canoes.1 Secondly, many other cultural paintings included signs of a Ghanaian modernity that can be traced back to the colonial period. Examples are overloaded, wooden Bedford trucks with hand-painted proverbs or buxom tomato sellers in urban markets wearing wide straw hats that block the tropical sun. Artists explained, in formal and informal conversations, that they view the references in their art work to legacies from a (pre)colonial past as a way to capture the beauty of Ghanaian culture and women, and as informal records for posterity. Not coincidently, the recurring repertoire of precolonial symbols, practices and objects depicted in paintings and sculptures strongly overlapped with what has been selected and promoted on a national level as Ghanaian

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Figure 7.1  Wiz Edinam Kudowar (2010), Sankofa variant, acrylic on canvas. Photo by the author. Published with permission from the artist.

heritage. The formation of cultural heritage in Ghana was in many respects a political project symbolized by the Akan symbol known as Sankofa (see also De Witte, this volume).2 Sankofa is a bird that moves forward while looking backwards at where it came from (Figure 7.1).3 Sankofa came to symbolize the idea that Ghanaians should not become alienated from their ‘roots’ but should build on a careful selection of ‘their’ precolonial cultural heritages in order to confidently move into the modern future. In Ghana, the nationalistic understanding and interpretation of the Sankofa symbol is known as Sankofaism. The formation of a national heritage in postcolonial countries is often associated with staged spectacles and prestige architectures aimed at creating collective identities that hide the fragmented nature of the nation state (De Jong and Rowlands 2007: 13; Probst 2007: 99). Local traditions and practices are, by contrast, seen as ‘authentic’ rather than staged. Anthropologist Katharina Schramm argued that we should not hold states and ‘ordinary’ people in the grip of a fabricated duality, as we tend to lose sight of how the different levels (states, heritage agencies and citizens) overlap and interpenetrate. Schramm analysed the formation of slave routes in Ghana as heritage and shows how the practices and discourses of the different actors involved – UNESCO, Ghana’s Ministry of Tourism and

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Diasporan tourists – feed into one another as they ‘constantly remould their position toward the past’ (Schramm 2007: 72). This chapter chronicles how artists’ sensorial-cognitive engagement with the past forms part of a creative process in which objects and cultural performances, featured as part of Ghanaian heritage by state agencies such as the National Commission on Culture, are appropriated, embodied and contested in modern visual art, forming ‘alternative imaginaries of memory’ (De Jong and Rowlands 2007). The chapter asks: how do modern artists’ versions of Sankofa and Sankofaism align with, or deviate from, national heritage practices and discourses? This chapter furthermore speaks to the central paradox presented in the introduction to this volume. The presentation of heritage as given and real in the face of its constructed nature creates a tension: a space for doubt that artists need to overcome. This tension raises the question of how artists authenticate the signs and symbols in their work as part of a Ghanaian or African heritage and as an essential ground to personal or collective identities. Why and how do artists become convinced of the power and value of the past, and which time period(s) do they deem most important in creating cultural identities? The engagement of modern artists with a national heritage canon has changed over time as artists’ relationships with state institutions weakened and artists became increasingly affected by the ongoing globalization of art and the emergence of alternative expressions of cultural identity. Therefore, I have selected the work of visual artists from three different generations, ranging from those who became active shortly after Ghana’s independence (1957) up to the newly emerging generation, to illustrate how the appropriation of national heritage relates to changing socio-historical settings and artists’ interactions with various audiences in and outside Ghana. The artists presented in this chapter are all educated to university level, all sign their work with their (brush) name and have enjoyed a reputation in Ghana as ‘established’.4 Generally speaking, highly educated, established artists look down on the cultural paintings sold by street vendors in buzzing public spaces such as Accra’s popular Labadi beach, the upscale neighbourhood Osu, or in craft markets or galleries located at the bottom of the art world’s hierarchy. At the same time, modern artists tap into a similar heritage canon as painters that are marked by them as ‘commercial artists’. This means that modern artists need to distinguish themselves from artwork that they consider panders to the taste of tourists in Ghana and lacks deeper levels of meaning. Art historian Salah Hassan has emphasized the importance of analysing the networks and socio-historical contexts in which artists operate and artworks circulate. The blurred boundaries and grey zones between different art forms in African countries, he argues, as well as the artificial dichotomy between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ art, need more attention (Hassan 1999 [1995]: 219). The question is how participants in local art worlds define what ‘modern art’ is and what it is not. The majority of modern Ghanaian

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artists practise easel painting, an art form that is generally associated with modern art in Ghana.5 What these modern painters generally share is a notion of art that underscores the uniqueness of the artist’s hand and the individuality of their work or art style. Their artwork is, furthermore, often stripped of practical or spiritual purposes and in that sense is different from art forms embedded in daily life or ritual. Traditional art made from wood, clay, brass or textiles is highly valued by modern artists as part of Ghana’s rich artistic history and an important source of inspiration, but at the same time, it is often considered to be collective and repetitive (Woets 2011). As such, modern artists tend to view traditional art as a set of aesthetics and philosophies unsuitable to giving full expression to the changes and concerns associated with postcolonialism. This chapter shows how the artistic practices of these artists are created within a particular arthistorical context and particular discourses in which the encounter with European modern art plays an important role (Woets 2014). The chapter also details the way a new generation of artists are challenging previously dominant notions of modern art.

The Sensory and Political Appeal of ‘this Stuff of Heritage’ According to historian D.R. Petersen (2015: 14), it was in the 1960s ‘when African nationalists were busily centralising political structures, opening new museums, and integrating their diverse people in the theatre and in political life, that “African heritage” surfaced as a subject of discourse’. A selection of artefacts, practices, performing arts or literary products were reclaimed as ‘African heritage’ in the formation of national cultures. In Ghana, the term ‘heritage’ appears to have been introduced in the late 1950s.6 This coincided with the emergence of an international movement following a UN convention that dealt with safeguarding ‘heritage’ after the destruction wrought by World War II. The conference also closely followed Ghana’s independence in 1957. The representation of colonial rule as a time during which African culture had been shattered and denigrated was part of a political strategy to affirm the ‘African self’ (Woets 2014: 464). The creation of a single cultural identity was, furthermore, an attempt to overcome ethnic and regional factionalism and to proudly present Ghana on a world stage as a modern country with unique historical culture(s). An assemblage of selected, objectified cultural forms, customs and objects was presented and adopted as the cultural heritage of the entire nation and this conception of national heritage was reinforced through schoolbooks and cultural festivals supported by the state (Coe 2002: 40). In Europe, heritage became associated with material, permanent objects such as monumental buildings and valuable items that were frozen in time, for example in museum displays (Probst 2012: 12). This focus on the material resonated with heritage practices in Ghana, where the National Museum in Accra displayed wooden stools, valuable textiles, brass castings, musical

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instruments such as the horn, drum and xylophone, or decorated umbrella tops and linguist staffs. These objects served as evidence of Ghana’s global art-historical and cultural significance (Agyemang Yeboah 2000:44; Hess 2001: 66; Fogelman 2008). The state used futuristic, modern designs to construct monuments such as the impressive expanse of the public square in Accra, build to commemorate the struggle for independence. However, heritage also often included practices defined by UNESCO in a 2003 convention as ‘intangible heritage’.7 In Ghana, the institution of chieftaincy as well as drumming and dancing from several ethnic groups were ‘heritagized’ and embodied though cultural competitions and festivals, as well as in the staged performances of the Ghana Dance Ensemble, established in 1962 (see Schauert 2015; De Witte this volume). An Arts Council was established in 1958 dedicated to protecting and stimulating the arts, often in the service of the new nation state. Visual artists were given the task of portraying cultural heritage in modern paintings and sculptures, as well as depicting the new president on coins, stamps or wall paintings, in order to validate his status as the new national leader (Hess 1998). Modern artists exhibited in the newly established national art centres and the statesponsored Ambassador hotel: they were commissioned to design sculptures of political ‘freedom fighters’ and party officials as well as new national symbols (Hess 1998: 178; Woets 2011: 123). Analogically to the cultural politics of the post-independence state, the pioneering generation of modern artists8 tended to present objects and customs from specific areas as part of a collective Ghanaian heritage, subscribing to the effort to formulate a national identity (Woets 2011: 137). As a consequence, ever since Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah’s engagement with the term, heritage has also been employed in artistic discourses. The first modern art organization, the Akwapim Six, was established in 1954, aimed at promoting, as the sculptor and initiator Oku Ampofo (1908–1998) wrote, ‘our (Ghanaian) heritage of indigenous art’ while at the same time safeguarding ‘complete freedom of expression’ (Ampofo 1972: 178). This quote illustrates the ways modern artists aimed to use elements of indigenous art forms while at the same time seeking to present themselves as individual producers of original and modern works (Okeke-Agulu 2013: 63). Artists designed heritage by working within the new frame of ‘modern art’, convinced as they were that older forms of art had served their purpose in a rapidly changing society. Heritage is a concept that in modern art stood for 1) specific objects, such as royal paraphernalia, musical instruments such as drums, xylophones or elephant tusks or fertility statues; 2) cultural practices, such as royal durbars, rites of passage, name-giving ceremonies for new-borns, music and dance performances; and 3) symbols such as Adinkra. These objects, practices and symbols, mainly of Akan origin and dating back to the precolonial period, formed a distinct cultural register that was presented as typically ‘Ghanaian’. This process of canonization was influenced

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by a colonial construction of heritage. Art teachers at Achimota School, a prestigious colonial institute in the Gold Coast that offered education from kindergarten up to a teacher training department, had stimulated their students to re-value a selection of African art forms. Native artists were attracted to the school to teach students weaving and carving (Woets 2014). Some artists also found inspiration in the aesthetic forms of masks and sculptures that had become masterpieces of African art in the eyes of European artists, curators and collectors (Harney 2004: 10). Taking sculptures from various cultural settings as a source of inspiration, artists expressed their allegiance to Pan-Africanist philosophies. They employed symbols and objects from a precolonial past as means to revitalize an ‘African culture’ that was believed to be on the verge of collapse due to the devastating influence of colonialism (Fanon 1970 [1961]: 178). The devaluation and deconstruction of objects under the influence of mission societies and colonialism, as well as the revaluation of a selection of African sculpture in Europe and the US, triggered the production of new images to cope with feelings of loss (see Probst 2011, 2012). After independence, the challenge faced by modern artists was to find a natural synthesis between African and European art, between past and present. The painter and official state artist Kofi Antubam argued that modern painting styles were only a vehicle to express what lay within: the content of any work should reflect the uniqueness of Ghana’s heritage and culture (1963: 131). Artists should not make watered-down versions of indigenous art forms in a society characterized by scientific ‘progress’ and Christianization, argued the painter, Ernest E. Asihene, in 1968: nor should they get lost in attempts to copy European art forms. The latter kind of work was seen as superficial, as ‘second-hand’, and left the artist behind in confusion and frustration, as Asihene wrote in the catalogue of the statesponsored exhibition ‘Cultural Heritage’ (1968: 18). For an artist such as Asihene, authenticity was less about cultural purity than about giving true expression to an African modernity.9 Some artists argued that heritage had to be selected and studied before it could be remoulded into a new art form that spoke to postcolonial concerns. As Kofi Antubam noted in his book Ghana’s Heritage of Culture (1963) in a rather Sankofaist manner: Ghana of today, therefore, inherits this stuff of heritage in the arts from the Gold Coast of yesterday only as the custodian of what she holds in trust for the Ghana of tomorrow. But Ghana’s sons and daughters naturally cannot ­effectively add anything to their heritage without research, classification of data, analysis, and codification and crystallization of ideas. Heated discussions are necessary. (1963: 193, my emphasis)

Nevertheless, in the discursive field in which the work of modern artists was valued and judged by state institutions and (foreign) buyers, heritage was, and often still is, considered to be a given source of inspiration for artists of African descent. The symbols and art styles that were presented by artists

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as part of their heritage suggested continuity with older art forms in Ghana. Interestingly, artists often discovered the strength and beauty of traditional art forms in (art) school or when residing abroad, as such objects were not often part of their own Christian and formally educated lifeworlds. A good example is the work of seminal painter Kobina Bucknor (1925–1975) who, in line with his predecessors, argued in the 1960s and 1970s that an African identity needed to be further developed through the arts. Apart from being a devoted artist with no formal training, Bucknor worked as a PhD-trained research scientist in biology. While studying at Colombia University in New York, Bucknor discovered the beauty of African art in a display of African sculptures from various parts of the continent in 1964 (Kwami 2013: 48).10 Bucknor did not define the objects on display in an American town as merely ritual sculptures that he, as a highly educated Catholic, had distanced himself from. As he wrote in one of his exhibition catalogues: ‘To me the whole vast continent of Africa is my territory for exploration and I claim an inalienable right as an African to exploit what rich heritage the continent has to offer’ (Bucknor 1971: Appendix). Kobina Bucknor, like his fellow modern artists in Ghana, felt these objects to be part of his own ‘rich heritage’: objects in which he was emotionally involved ‘as an African’, and more than entitled to use and reflect on in his work. For him, the sculptural idiom of carvers all over Africa embodied shared aesthetic norms. Bucknor created intimacy by metaphorically savouring the aesthetic forms of African anthropomorphic sculptures and, as he put it: to digest it as it were and ‘regurgitate’ it in a form suited to a two-dimensional mode of expression i.e. painting, and the success of this process depends upon the extent to which the artist is emotionally involved in his appreciation of the source of his inspiration. (Bucknor 1971: Appendix, my emphasis)

It was through the act of consumption and ‘regurgitation’ that Bucknor became one with those sculptures and their ‘ancient, unadulterated roots’, as he called it (Fosu 1977: 34). Bucknor argued that an intellectual, cognitive engagement with historical objects was not sufficient: an emotional involvement was required to successfully create two-dimensional lines and forms that revealed the legacy of an artistic African past. Bucknor blended himself into the object world of African sculpture by digesting them: they became part of his inner body. Bucknor did not deny that this process also involved conscious decision-making and selection, as he referred to his way of working as ‘retrieving from the past all that is sublime in our culture and preserving it for future generations’ (Bucknor 1968: 29). This quote echoes the idea of Sankofa: that the past should not be literally brought back to life but rather should serve as a valuable, sacralised resource to build a modern identity. Bucknor’s argument speaks to the central idea proposed by this volume that the appeal of heritage depends on it being experienced as authentic and real through mental, sensorial and emotional engagements in which the body functions as the harbinger of truth.

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Bucknor’s use of what he termed ‘the sculptural idiom’ found expression in his acrylic paintings on board in exaggerated features, such as elongated necks, an Akan beauty ideal; the stylized human figures and animals of Ashanti gold weights; and mask-like facial features. His subject matter was often inspired by an idea of heritage as ‘our rich and ancient way of life’ from which any sign of African modernity was omitted, although he would acknowledge that a signed painting on canvas was, itself, a modern form. The scenes portrayed in Bucknor’s paintings that I found in the storeroom of the National Museum in Accra are telling: northern musicians playing a local xylophone that has gourds under its blades; the town crier with his gong gong (a double bell made of brass); an Ashanti royal sword bearer with a stunning, elaborate eagle feather headdress; a priest pouring a libation; men from northern Ghana decorating gourds and more (see also Bucknor 1971). With few exceptions, modern artists’ choice of subjects was far removed from the urbanization and industrialization of postcolonial Ghana, as well as from the growing social and political turmoil of the 1960s and beyond. The presentation of a dignified and glorious past served as a way to rehabilitate the self, others and the nation and acted furthermore as a justification for a national culture of the future. Modern artists’ work was highly political in that it contributed to the formation of a national identity, contesting stereotypical representations of precolonial Africa as a continent of ‘primitive peoples’ who lacked a ‘higher civilization’. The sculptor and physician Oku Ampofo, for example, was confronted with racism at the University of Edinburgh where he studied medicine and lived from 1932 to 1940: ‘We the blacks were always made to feel inferior. We were described as primitive and without culture … I determined to set for myself the goal of showing the world that our forefathers did have a culture and tradition’ (Vieta 2000: 407). Like Kobina Bucknor, Oku Ampofo fought this kind of racial prejudice by appropriating art forms in his sculptures from different parts of Africa, aiming to show the world the richness and sophistication of both Ghana’s and Africa’s cultural past (Fosu 2009: 63). In an ebony sculpture entitled Bust of a Young Girl (1970), Ampofo used a long ringed neck, an Akan beauty ideal, and a flat mask-like face with slanted eyes (see Fosu 2009: 64). Like avant-garde artists in Europe and the United States, he felt that naturalism in art was superficial and detached from real and everyday life. Like Bucknor, Oku Ampofo also discovered the appeal and importance of African sculptures when far away from home. In 1949, he wrote in the journal for the West African Society about his encounters with African sculpture pieces in Western European museums: I found in these ancient masterpieces the emotional appeal and satisfaction which western education had failed to cultivate in me. It was as though an African had to go all the way to Europe to discover himself! (quoted in Mount 1973: 173)

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Standing in front of glass cases filled with dimly lit sculptures in the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium; the British Museum in London; and the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, Ampofo felt the boundaries between himself and the material objects on display melting (July 1987: 53). Stolen, sold or donated objects that had once been part of everyday life or that had been commissioned by European traders or colonial administrators became a mirror, in which Ampofo saw a reflection of a lost self. Even though such ‘ancient masterpieces’ were probably still used in performances or now produced for craft markets, modern artists tended to locate African sculptures in a timeless past and spoke about such objects in terms of heritage and loss. Between European museum walls where such objects had long been displayed to implicitly justify the colonial project, they now generated a feeling of home. Ampofo, who had to cope with the legacy of the colonial past and the ignorance of his fellow students in the university, found and felt proof in ethnographic museums of the ingenuity of artists to whom he felt emotionally attached, as to his ancestors. Western education he felt, had created a void, as the umbilical cord with his material past and artistic ancestry had been cut. This did not mean that these old forms were now lost. Although he did not use specifically Jungian terminology, Ampofo’s discourses seem to resonate with Carl Jung’s concept of a collective unconsciousness inscribed with archetypical forms. In the Jungian view, such forms were retrievable from the collective cultural memory (Kasfir 1999: 51). Such ideas go back to a colonial past in which European art teachers were convinced that forms and patterns of older indigenous art were stored in their African students’ subconscious from where they could be retrieved (Mudimbe 1994: 278; Woets 2014: 453). Ampofo wrote in a chapter, with the telling title ‘Sankofa’, that African children ‘automatically take to the traditional way of expression. It is only when they are later subjected to the sterile influences of Western academics that they lose touch with real art …’ (1968: 25 my emphasis). Although it was in Western Europe, as much as in Ghana, that Ampofo found an entry point into an African past, he suggested that Ghanaian artists who studied in the United Kingdom had lost an innate quality, as they ‘were all spoiled’ by a British-style education (Svašek 1997: 35). The intimate encounter between subject and object, between artist and African sculpture, is entangled in a transnational, political and historical web and can only be understood in relation to a history of colonial ­oppression, the struggle for independence, processes of urbanization and fear of cultural alienation. The works of Bucknor and Ampofo reveal a long history and trajectory. African objects, made and used in local settings, moved to curiosity cabinets, ethnographic museums and curio shops in Europe. Some of these African sculptures were ‘discovered’ by avantgarde artists, who deeply admired them and used them to break with the idea that Naturalism, as an art style, stood on the upper rung of the evolutionary ladder. While artists in Paris and other cities appropriated

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the aesthetics of African sculptures in their work during the early decades of the twentieth century, African artists began to use elements from European art and continued to do so after independence. An artist such as Kobina Bucknor, who was well read, became acquainted with the work of Picasso through art books. His knowledge of Cubism and the encounter with African sculptures in the United States set him on a path of similar experimentation. To complicate this circulation of objects and ideas even further, colonial art education in the Gold Coast also played a role in the revaluation of African art. European art teachers at the prestigious Achimota School, for example, tried hard to instil in their students a love for local weavings, carvings and ceramics, sometimes in the face of their students’ considerable resistance. The teachers were influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement and the embrace of primitivism in Europe (Woets 2014: 463). Colonial rule, then, was not simply a period during which African culture was unambiguously denigrated, even though the ‘African’ components in Achimota’s curriculum remained in the margins. As a consequence, modern Ghanaian artists often reiterated European hierarchies of art, in which a particular selection of African sculptures were deeply admired and at the same time seen as unselfconscious, collective and timeless. Artists reproduced the primitivist notion of the African craftsman as a spiritual creature who is more interested in an interpretive experience of art than in representing the exactness of objects or people (see for example Ampofo 1968: 24). This is not to say that artists such as Ampofo and Bucknor simply imitated the ideas and modes of perception of avant-garde artists in Europe or colonial teachers in regard to African art. Rather, they drew on these influences to develop their own, different, logic. Anonymous African sculptures that might have had little in common in terms of origin, history, use or meaning became tangible proof of a shared heritage for modern African artists and were embodied or remembered as part of the self. As such, these sculptures formed an entry point into an imagined shared past: a source of inspiration to create and feel pan-African and Ghanaian pride and identity. I need to add here that artists in the years immediately following Ghanaian independence depended on state support, as there were no commercial galleries at that time. Artwork had to fit a political agenda and as Nkrumah’s regime became increasingly oppressive, artists had no choice but to stay within the realm of a kind of National Art. The National Arts Council11 only selected idealistic representations of traditional culture, which almost automatically led to the production of rural scenes, as the countryside was most unaffected by industrialization. Artworks that were not clearly inspired by a ‘Ghanaian’ or ‘African’ past but by modern city life were brushed off by the media and the Arts Council as being un-Ghanaian (Quao 1969–1970: 155). Painter Ato Delaquis, for example, remembered that the Arts Council rejected his portraits of taxi drivers on the grounds that they were ‘not cultural’ (personal conversation June 2008).

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Heritage as a Frame to Engage with Powerful Objects The notion that Ghanaian artists should work around a shared cultural and precolonial past lost its meaning for a great many artists after President Kwame Nkrumah’s regime was ousted in a coup d’état in 1966 (Fosu 1993: 167). As art historian Kojo Fosu wrote: ‘The obligation to national pride is no longer an immediate factor in their works’ (1993: 167). Alternating military and democratic regimes shifted state power repeatedly in the aftermath of the coup, until Ghana adopted a democratic constitution in 1992. The successive governments that took power after 1966 did not depart far from Kwame Nkrumah’s understanding of Sankofa.12 The ­national canon still consisted of practices and objects supposedly rooted in a precolonial past. The imagined purity of precolonial culture had served as a means to break with colonial domination and as a building block for the formation of the ‘African personality’. When Kwame Nkrumah’s ‘African renaissance’ did not materialize, some disillusioned artists began to expand the category of Ghanaian heritage. They included cultural expressions in their work that testified of the long history of encounters between Africa, Europe and North America and were nevertheless still unmistakably ‘Ghanaian’. Examples of themes that express a Ghanaian modernity and are still popular today are vibrant scenes of life in city markets and bus stations (Svašek 1997: 40). Markers of precolonial culture remained popular among modern artists as a source of great inspiration. I use the work of Benjamin Offei-Nyako (b. 1951) to illustrate how the inspiration from a national canon did not necessarily come naturally to artists, who needed to be persuaded of the positive power of items such as cowry shells as heritage objects. OffeiNyako’s work, furthermore, shows how some artists played with the essentialist expectations of foreigners of what ‘African art’ should look like, and used heritage as a resource to enrich and expand their artistic styles. Benjamin Offei-Nyako, who signs his work, ‘Bon’, is known for his dreamy scenes of women in rural environments in an impressionistic art style, which he views as records for posterity (Kwami 2013: 183). In our interview in July 2008, Bon attributed the monumental quality of his female figures and his colour orchestration to his mentor, the well-known Ghanaian painter Amon Kotei (1915–2011) and to Social Realism, a movement that inspired him during his postgraduate study at the Nikolai Pavlovich Institute of Fine Art in Sofia, Bulgaria, from 1979 to 1981. His work also revealed his own rigorous academic upbringing at the College of Art (now the Faculty of Fine Art) in Kumasi, where he graduated in 1976. When Bon arrived in Manchester in 1989 to study at the Medlock Art School, he noticed that his English teachers were taken by surprise when he showed them his oil portraits. They had expected his work to be ‘more African’ and ‘less European’. Bon felt slightly annoyed by the underlying prejudices in their comments, and asked his lecturers if Picasso’s famous

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Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) was a European or African work of art. Because, as Bon pointed out, ‘the sculptural images in that painting are purely African’.13 Bon claimed the right to employ Impressionism as an art style by stating that Picasso did not become less European by using African motifs. The basic definition that Bon maintains of African art is ‘art made by an African’. However, he also realized that a change of style would make him ‘a bit different from anybody else’. In other words, a switch to a more African way of painting could serve as a strategy for distinguishing himself from fellow students at the Art School in Manchester. Studying in a setting far away from home, Bon looked at himself through the eyes of his English lecturers. Bon made new work and when he showed one of his lecturers one-dimensional, linoleum prints of women carrying babies on their backs and bowls on their head, the teacher nodded approvingly: ‘Aah, this is African!’ Ironically, the African style of his prints was born in the English – as opposed to Ghanaian – context. What is African is not given but constituted in relation to the outside world. Here, Africanness was created in the interaction between Bon and one of his teachers at the Medlock Art School: a teacher who was likely influenced by the cliché that African art lacks perspective and is semi-abstract. Bon had similar experiences in the US, where he taught ‘Art’ and ‘African Art’ at the North Carolina Central University in Durham, in 1999 and 2000. To meet the expectations of his African-American students, who also associated African art with abstractionism, Bon combined several elements from the cultural past into one flat frame. He used Adinkra symbols, native combs, cowry shells, flat human figures with large buttocks and round huts. At the same time, he was also inspired by African-American quilts and drew from the aesthetics of patchwork. Bon claimed that it was in the United Kingdom that he realized, in the encounter with foreign lecturers, that he should identify himself not simply as ‘an artist’ but as ‘an African artist’. Nevertheless, his teachers at the university in Kumasi also played an important role. In the 1970s, some art teachers at the University in Kumasi, including the Afro-American artist Leroy Mitchell, tried to persuade their students to give African art a place in their life and work. Bon, who came from a Christian background in which he had learned to condemn African sculptures as ‘very fetish’, was told by his lecturers to draw wooden stools and other traditional objects in class. Apparently, his lectures defined African art as those objects that had become part of national heritage and were spoken of as traditional art. As Bon explained: They were the ones who were pushing us to realize the importance of African culture and African art in our lives as artists. So, we got used to that … Years ago with the sculpture things, I’ll be scared because they were supposed to perform some magic. Nowadays, I am not scared of that anymore. I have put up a house somewhere close to Kumasi and I took some of my sculpture pieces

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over there. The children who passed by were scared: ‘that is the fetish house!’ [laughs]. So it was initially difficult for me as a Christian to accept it. But as I developed as an artist, I realized that yes; I needed to identify myself first as an African artist before anything else.

The resistance that Bon initially felt is part of a colonial legacy in which mission societies associated local objects used as vessels in the communication with gods and spirits with paganism and rejected them as fetish (Meyer 1999, 2008, 2010). The extent to which such ideas become embodied became clear to me when Bon said that he still finds it hard to draw the human figure in an abstract, non-proportional way due to what he called his ‘Christian training’. Bon experienced an incompatibility between identifying as an African artist and as a Christian. Interestingly, heritage functions as a frame that enables Bon to solve that tension and engage with an African past from a safe distance. He learned to reframe such objects as part and parcel of an African heritage, as objects to be put on display as art pieces that testify to the creativity and ingenuity of African sculptors. In so doing, sculptures are divested of their spiritual powers. If Bon felt that the wooden sculptures that he kept in his home exerted power over his Christian body, as they did when he viewed them as part of traditional religion, he would not be able to collect them. In his own artwork, ‘fetish’ objects such as cowry shells are represented in a different medium and become ‘modern Ghanaian art’, to be enjoyed for its aesthetic qualities. Spiritual objects are caught in a new frame from where they reference the culturally rich past but no longer come to life through animation.

‘Object of Questioning’: Heritage Deconstructed Multimedia artists of the younger generation in Ghana do not always feel the need to fall back on a heritage repertoire. It is not that heritage plays no role in their work, but it does not always take the emotional and cultural value of heritage at face value. Instead, the role and value of heritage and identity is subjected to playful investigation and manipulation. This treatment of heritage is clearly different from that employed by artists from previous generations, who seldom questioned the ideological premises of heritage as a construction. As already discussed, artists were inspired by themes and forms from a national heritage repertoire to revitalize cultural expressions and art forms that were believed to be on the verge of collapse, to (re)gain cultural pride or construct a national and pan-African identity as well as to develop new art styles. The newer generation, however, remould art into a dissident tool, finding technical sophistication less important than the idea behind the work and using wit in provoking their audiences and drawing attention to their work (Woets 2013: 30). This group of multimedia artists has grown rapidly since the 1990s. The artistic language that they speak articulates easily with the kind of art that is displayed at international

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art festivals such as Biennales, a format that, in the past few decades, has mushroomed all over the world (Belting and Buddensieg 2013).14 A good example is recent work by multimedia artist and writer Bernard Akoi-Jackson (b. 1979). In the late summer of 2014, Akoi-Jackson posed in front of the camera at the old and new entrances of the Stedelijk Museum, the museum for modern and contemporary art in Amsterdam. The artist was invited by the museum’s education department to become a ‘global artist-in-residence’ and conducted workshops with young adults. The residency took place in the framework of the museum’s Global Collaborations Program,15 an initiative of curator Jelle Bouwhuis and authorized by former director Ann Goldstein. The artist intended to fill the empty sculpture stands in the facade of the main museum building dating from the nineteenth century, with the pictures that resulted from the photo session. Akoi-Jackson’s aim was to create new ‘sculptures’ that would enter into a conversation with the sculpted portraits of illustrious sixteenth and seventeenth century Dutch architects and painters that adorn the outer facade of the museum. His sculptures would also interact with passers-by in the crowded streets. As a conceptual artist, whose work is often of a performative nature, Bernard Akoi-Jackson aims to break out of the confines of the white cube in addressing audiences in public spaces and to create work that responds to its immediate environment. His work and performances are intended to provoke, to generate discussion and create new narratives in the dialogue between viewers and artist. One intriguing picture shows how Akoi-Jackson transformed his body into a fictional, royal character with golden hair (Figure 7.2). The nameless character is donning orange and blue African wax cloth fabrics and tie-dyed cloth; on his feet are wooden shoes in delft blue. The cloth, shoes and the props in his hand, a tin of Dutch syrup waffles and a miniature wooden Akan stool, reference icons of both a Ghanaian and Dutch heritage. Akoi-Jackson’s posture copies the solemn poses of the sculpted figures in the facade of the museum: one arm akimbo, one foot before the other, head held high, an earnest and confident gaze. This work also references the performance Posing on Stairs by the (in)famous art duo Gilbert and George. The artists appeared on the interior stairs of the Stedelijk Museum in 1969 with their face and hands covered in multicoloured metallic paint. Their stiff bodily postures and the metallic paint transformed their bodies into living bronze sculptures (Cherix 2009: 90). What did the artist try to achieve? The objects that he used are what he calls ‘objects of questioning’.16 The objects in the pictures for the Stedelijk Museum are supposed to raise questions about processes of inclusion, exclusion and cultural ownership. If a Ghanaian wears clogs that are generally considered iconic signs of Dutch identity and heritage, does that make him Dutch? Is he allowed to wear them? Heritage does not just raise questions of inclusion and exclusion. When cultural objects become heritage, according to Akoi-Jackson, they often enter into a state of coma

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Figure 7.2  Bernard Akoi-Jackson (2014). Conceptual photographic sketch of proposed installation view. Untitled: Glocalocations. Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Photo: Tomek Dersu Aaron. Conceptual sketch: Selassie Essor. Published with permission.

in which they are kept alive but can no longer participate. His use of massproduced items from one of the many, interchangeable souvenir shops in Amsterdam as well as the art market in Accra, is also a pun on the current global commercialization and branding of heritage and ethnicity (see Dwyer and Grang 2002; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). The intention of what Akoi-Jackson calls his ‘pseudo-rituals’ is not to fall back on clichéd images of African heritage that meet the expectations of Dutch audiences. As he insisted in an interview with the art journal Metropolitan M: ‘It will be thus unfortunate if interest in me and my work were only rooted in a parochial thirst for an exoticized ‘Other’, which I would then read as a form of repressed and eroticized anthropological voyeurism’ (Jürgenson 2014). Instead, as the artist told me: ‘What I do in my art is to present things that look authentic but are inherently fake … inherently super constructed or deliberately constructed, to push people toward questioning’. It

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is not Akoi-Jackson’s intention to communicate ideas about the mediated nature of identity in a manner that requires passive reception on the part of viewers. The artists invite viewers to ‘help construct it (heritage), even though they are already doing it … It is something of the creation of a collective, contemporary narrative, which becomes the history of the object’. Akoi-Jackson uses bold, heavily patterned wax cloth fabrics as powerful, multilayered objects that symbolize cultural hybridity in a world of growing complexity and entanglement. In the late nineteenth century, Dutch and British trading companies began to successfully market imitation Java batiks in West African markets, where these imitations were modified to local taste. Over time, the cloth came to denote an embodied sense of belonging and authenticity: it became, amongst other things, a token of an African identity and heritage. Today, the majority of African wax cloth prints are produced in China. More often than not, these textiles are imitations or reformulations of designs from the Dutch company Vlisco. In daily life, Akoi-Jackson wears wax print fabrics to create confusion and ‘disturb people’s peace’, as he put it. One of his favourite outfits is a long, wax cloth garment with matching trousers. He told a group of students at the University in Leiden where he gave a presentation: ‘I wear prints that look African but were made in Holland based on Indonesian batik and are now copied by the Chinese. I am Christian but I dress like a Muslim’ (lecture Leiden University, 2 October 2014). In our interview, he explained: ‘People compliment me, “so that is a nice African dress”. And I say: “Yes it is nicely Dutch”. A Ghanaian, who sees this as his culture can argue that it is not and we can engage in a discussion’. By using a product, which was generated in dynamic conversations with outside influences, Akoi-Jackson argues that a pure, unadulterated heritage is a myth (De Jong 2009; Woets 2013: 38). At the same time, the artist wished to add more layers to this discussion by moving beyond a deconstructive take on identity claims. Consumers of wax cloth might not realize that their favourite textiles are mediated by foreign production companies such as Vlisco to appeal only to them (see also Plankensteiner and Mayo Adediran 2011 about the reception of Austrian-produced lace in Nigeria). What consumers might lose sight of, argues Akoi-Jackson, are the structures of economic exploitation in unequal trading relations between Africa and Europe that go back to the precolonial period. This argument articulates with cultural theorist Terry Eagleton’s conception of ‘structures of power’ that ‘become structures of feeling’ (see introduction, this volume), as commercial companies aim to influence consumer’s affections. In flamboyant advertisements, Vlisco invites clients to continue to authenticate and appropriate its commodities as part of their expressive culture and heritage (Delhaye and Woets 2015: 85). A means of exposing structures of inequality is to create historical awareness. This was when Akoi-Jackson gave his own interpretation of Sankofa in our conversation, one that differed from the state’s national identity project and moral messages. Akoi-Jackson explained that when

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commercial companies and consumers both began ‘to Sankofa and peel off the layers’, it should at least be possible to unearth existing power structures and maybe revise them somehow. By transforming ‘Sankofa’ into a verb, Akoi-Jackson urges his audience to actively and critically consider the political dimensions of popular African wax prints. Vlisco cloth became an import to the Gold Coast after slavery had been abolished. However, the cloth followed precolonial trade routes once used to exchange cotton textiles for enslaved human beings. The fact that designers of the cloth are still predominantly Dutch and work from a studio in the south of the Netherlands is part of a colonial history of inequality (Edoh 2016: 259). Despite Akoi-Jackson’s critical stance towards heritage as a practice of fixing, he also uses heritage in articulating new messages. The blue cloth that Akoi-Jackson wears in the photograph carries the motif of a motherbird bringing worms to her fledglings. In Ghana, this cloth is popularly known as ‘The Good Mother Knows what her Children will Eat’. Textile traders and consumers in West and Central African markets name wax cloth fabrics after popular expressions in order to make the cloth meaningful and enhance its market potential. Adding metaphorical meaning to wax cloth fabrics goes back to the custom of naming expensive textiles, such as Kente cloth, to underline their special value (Gott 2010: 16). Akoi-Jackson used this motif to express the responsibility of the Stedelijk Museum to ‘cater for the public or the social heritage, the human heritage. To feed the world with good art’. So, did the museum view his installation as ‘good art’: as sufficiently nutritious to feed the hungry crowds outside the museum walls? Only two days before its implementation, Akoi-Jackson’s photo project was stopped by the museum’s curatorial management despite the earlier approval given by the education department. The curatorial team might have missed the work’s ironic pun on heritagization by viewing the photo installation as ‘folkloristic’. The curatorial team still maintains different standards for the work of African artists and European artists. Artwork that references traditional art and is made by an African artist is, in their eyes, more at home in an ethnographic or historical-cultural museum. That was not the only reason why the project was brought to a halt. It was by an unknown artist, at least to the curatorial department and management, who was on the verge of realizing a project of which many artists and curators had been dreamed. They told the artist that the soon to be director of the museum, Beatrix Ruf, would select the first artist to artistically interact with the nineteenth century museum facade. In fact, it was Ruf herself who ordered the management to call off the project. Akoi-Jackson did not mind, he said, as he would use the virtual highway to expose his pictures and reach an even larger audience. Despite the use of different media, Bon and Bernard Akoi-Jackson both use cultural objects in their work to create new messages for global audiences. The differences between the work of postmodern artist AkoiJackson and the modern painter Bon might be obvious. While Bon does not

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question the value of heritage and defines art in the realm of beauty, formal qualities and technical skills, Akoi-Jackson, conversely, is more concerned with questioning concepts or objects that many people take at face value. Not coincidentally, Akoi-Jackson’s critique of heritage as static and a sign of people’s reluctance to accept fragility as part of the human condition corresponds well with performance as his preferred medium of expression. Both performance and culture are, in the artist’s view, ephemeral, fluid and changeable.

Relating to Sankofa in One Way or Another All the artists portrayed in this chapter used objects, practices and symbols that are generally valued as part of a national heritage in the production of alternative images. How and why artists mediate heritage in their work, and how the past speaks to them on both an emotional and cognitive level, is related to changing sociopolitical settings, understandings of what Ghanaian art is or what it should do, as well as to changing art markets. The use of objects and practices that are widely recognized as elements of a national, albeit contested, heritage does not simply function as a market strategy in the jungle of stereotypical expectations from foreign buyers looking for authentic Africa. Such a view is far too simplistic. Modern artists initially embraced a conception of Sankofa aligned with Nkrumah’s concept of ‘African personality’: a conception seeking to counter cultural alienation and shape national, anti-colonial as well as pan-African ideologies. For pioneering modern artists like Kobina Bucknor and Oku Ampofo, the re-creation of objectified traditions served goals that went beyond the local. Modern artists used traditional art and culture to present Ghana on a world stage as a modern nation with its own unique history and culture. Over time, artists drifted away from nationalist readings of Sankofa and created alternative meanings. Benjamin Offei-Nyako sometimes foregrounds ‘African’ identity and objects in order to meet the expectations of foreigners: this stance serves as a strategy to distinguish his work from others in the competitive art market and to create new, personal art styles. Bon’s appreciation for particular African sculptures as heritage was cultivated in the classroom in both Ghana and the United Kingdom. As his Christian education had taught him to condemn and fear such sculptures as ‘fetish’, the frames of art and heritage enabled him to neutralize their spiritual power and engage with the past from a safe distance. Bernard Akoi-Jackson aims to move beyond conceptions of an immutable African heritage by discussing heritage as mediated and constructed and, as such, to link up with multimedia and conceptual artists around the globe. The idea of Sankofa as a tool against cultural alienation or a resource to formulate a national identity has lost importance with the decline of the state as guardian of a national heritage. Some artists no longer value heritage as the basis on which their

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work should build, but rather subject it to ironic scrutiny. Artists are not alone in creating alternative expressions of cultural identity that build on an imagined African past. Marleen de Witte shows in this volume how heritage in Ghana became subjected to the forces of the market and generated a form of commercial entertainment that speaks to younger generations with little or no interest in the state’s limited definition of cultural heritage. Both artists and cultural entrepreneurs create alternative heritage forms that are not entirely new. Heritage is (re)made in accordance with Sankofaism while at the same time departing from, or even contesting, the national heritage project. This chapter has shown that the changing engagements of artists with Sankofaism, through the unfolding of individual and idiosyncratic conceptions and creativity, takes place within a context of global and historical movements of people, objects and ideas that condition the paths that creativity can take. Consequently, Ghanaian artists’ work can be used as a window to address larger issues of heritage formation and sociopolitical transformations. Rhoda Woets is an Assistant Professor at Utrecht University College, the Netherlands. She has published on contemporary art in Ghana, the circulation and appropriation of Jesus pictures in urban Ghana and African wax cloth fabrics.

Notes   1. Adinkra is a plain cloth, stamped with a set of symbols associated with a specific proverb or saying, mostly worn at funerals. The symbols represent expressions that address history, codes of conduct or concepts such as love, hope, unity, power and wisdom. Adinkra symbols are imprinted on cotton cloth by means of stamps made from calabashes or dry gourds (Fianu 2007: 31–42).   2. The symbol Adinkra was often associated with the proverb: Se wo were fi na wosan kofa a yennkui, translated by Prof. Ablade Glover as ‘It is no taboo to return and fetch it when you forget. You can always undo your mistakes’ (1992 [1969]). This interpretation of Sankofa is still widely shared.   3. Figure 7.1 shows a painting of Sankofa by Wisdom Kudowar, a well-known artist in Ghana. The mask-like faces projected onto the bird’s red, feathered body seem to symbolize the distant, African past.   4. ‘Established’ is synonymous with ‘successful’ in the Ghanaian art world, and implies having a number of local and foreign exhibitions on one’s CV, selling work for ­relatively high prices and having practised art for many years. The category of ‘established’ is discursively opposed to ‘upcoming’, although the boundary between ‘established’ and ‘upcoming’ is blurred.   5. Although easel painting was introduced in the colonial period, painting as a medium of expression dates back to the precolonial period. Examples are patterns on canoes, paddles, textiles or compound walls.   6. The earliest use of the term I have been able to trace was by the illustrious lawyer and politician Joe Appiah, who used it in Parliament in 1957 (Hagan 2001: 24).   7. In the ‘Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage’, adopted in 2003, UNESCO defines intangible cultural heritage as the ‘the practices,

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r­ epresentations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith – that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage’ (UNESCO 2003: 2).   8. I borrow the term ‘pioneering generation’ from art historian Kojo Fosu and artist Ablade Glover (see Fosu 2009). By this term, I to refer to the first generation of artists in the Gold Coast and Ghana who attended formal art schools in Ghana and abroad and defined modern art as technically skilled, individual artwork made without commercial intentions.   9. See Fillitz (2015) for discussion of various social, dynamic constructions of authenticity in relation to contemporary African art. 10. Some of Bucknor’s contemporaries also found an entrance to their ‘African past’ when residing abroad, which might not be surprising, as foreign environments made artists conscious of what they perceived as their African culture and heritage. The well-known Ghanaian sculptor Vincent Kofi, for example, expressed in an interview in African Arts that observing the influence of African sculpture on European artists more generally and on his teachers at the Royal College of Art in London in particular made him put his heritage in true perspective (Grobel 1970: 68). 11. The Arts Council organized and sponsored exhibitions in Ghana and in its embassies abroad to promote modern Ghanaian art and also bought work to build up a national collection. Artists took up jobs at the Arts Council or applied there for funding and materials to put up group exhibitions. 12. The National Commission on Culture, for example, argued in 2004 in a rather Nkrumah-ist fashion that their policy seeks to ‘to respect, preserve, harness and use their [Ghanaian citizens’] cultural heritage and resources to develop a united, vibrant and prosperous national community with a distinctive African identity and personality and a collective confidence and pride of place among the comity of Nations’ (2004: 1). 13. All quotes by Benjamin Offei-Nyako are taken from an interview I conducted with the painter in Kumasi, in July 2008. 14. According to art historian Hans Belting, the work exhibited at Biennales have in common that originality is no longer found in the art style but rather in the (conceptual) idea behind the work. The new media that artists work with, such as video and installation, are global tools used to express multiform messages that represent ‘the global universe in local views. This explains why global art does not look the same everywhere’ (2009: 59). 15. For more information about the Global Collaborations Program (2013–2015) of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, see http://global.stedelijk.nl (accessed September 2017). 16. All quotes by Bernard Akoi-Jackson are taken from an interview I conducted in Amsterdam on 6 November 2014, unless stated otherwise. Information about the photo project in the Stedelijk museum was provided by Bernard Akoi-Jackson and curator Jelle Bouwhuis.

References Agyemang Y.M. 2000. ‘Strategies for Effective and Efficient Management of Museums as Resource for Research and Public Education: A Case-Study of the Ghana National Museum’, Master’s Dissertation. Kumasi: Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. Ampofo, O. 1968. ‘Sankofa’, in Cultural Heritage (exhibition catalogue). Accra-Tema: Ghana Publishing Corporation, pp. 24–25.

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———. 1972. ‘The Akwapim Six’, in D. Brokensha (ed.), Akwapim ­­­ Handbook. Tema: Ghana Publishing Corporation, pp. 178. Antubam, K. 1963. Ghana’s Heritage of Culture. Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang. Asihene, E.V. 1968. ‘Painting in Ghana’, in Cultural Heritage (exhibition catalogue). Accra-Tema: Ghana Publishing Corporation, pp. 16–18. Belting, H. 2009. ‘Contemporary Art as Global Art: A Critical Estimate’, in H. Belting and A. Buddensieg (eds), The Global Art World. Ostfildern, pp. 38–73. Belting, H. and A. Buddensieg. 2013. ‘Introduction’, in H. Belting, A. Buddensieg and P. Weibel (eds), The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds. Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM). London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 6–8. Bucknor, K. 1968. ‘“Odor Fofor”: The Offering of the New Yam’, in Cultural Heritage (exhibition catalogue). Accra-Tema: Ghana Publishing Corporation. ———. 1971. Exhibition: The Sculptural Idiom (exhibition catalogue). Accra: Arts Council of Ghana. Cherix, C. 2009. In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960–1976. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Coe, C. 2002. ‘Educating an African Leadership: Achimota and the Teaching of African Culture in the Gold Coast’, Africa Today 49(3): 22–44. Cole, H.M. and D.H. Ross. 1977. The Arts of Ghana. Los Angeles, CA: University of California. Comaroff, J.L. and J. Comaroff. 2009. Ethnicity Inc. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago. De Jong, F. 2009. ‘First Word: Hybrid Heritage’, African Arts 42(4): 1, 4–5. De Jong, F. and M. Rowlands. 2007. ‘Reconsidering Heritage and Memory’, in F. De Jong and M. Rowlands (eds), Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, pp. 13–30. Delaquis, A. 1975–1976. ‘Dilemma of the Contemporary African Artist (I and II)’, Transition (Double Anniversary number) 50: 9, CH’INABA 1(1): 16–30. Delhaye, C. and R. Woets. 2015. ‘The Commodification of Ethnicity: Vlisco Fabrics and Wax Cloth Fashion in Ghana’, International Journal of Fashion Studies 1(2): 77–97. Dwyer, C. and P. Grang. 2002. ‘Fashioning Ethnicities: The Commercial Spaces of Multiculture’, Ethnicities 2(3): 410–30. Edoh, A.M. 2016. ‘Redrawing Power? Dutch Wax Cloth and the Politics of “Good Design”’. Journal of Design History 29(3): 258–72. Fanon, F. 1970 [1961]. Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Fianu, D.A.G. 2007. Ghana’s Kente & Adinkra: History and SocialCultural Significance in a Contemporary Global Economy. Accra: Black Mask.

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Fillitz, T. 2015. ‘Cultural Regimes of Authenticity and Contemporary Art of Africa’, in T. Fillitz and A.J. Saris (eds), Debating Authenticity: Concepts of Modernity in Anthropological Perspective. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 211–25. Fogelman, A. 2008. ‘Colonial Legacy in African Museology: The Case of the Ghana National Museum’, Museum Anthropology 31(1):19–27. Fosu, K. 1977. ‘Dr. Kobina Bucknor: The Artist and his “Sculptural Idiom”’, Image, Journal of the College of Art 1(4): 23–35. ———. 1993. 20th Century Art of Africa (revised edition). Kumasi: University of Science and Technology. ———. 2009. Pioneers of Contemporary Ghanaian Art Exhibition (exhibition catalogue). Accra: Artists Alliance Gallery. Glover, Ablade. 1992 [1969]. Adinkra Symbolism (illustrated poster). Kumasi: University of Science and Technology. Gott, S. 2010. ‘The Ghanaian Kaba: Fashion that Sustains Culture’, in S.  Gott and K. Loughran (eds), Contemporary African Fashion. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 11–27. Grobel, L. 1970. ‘Ghana’s Vincent Kofi’, African Arts 3(4): 8–11, 68–70, 80. Hagan, G.P. 2001. ‘Nkrumah’s Cultural Policy’, in K. Arhin (ed.), The Life and Work of Kwame Nkrumah. Accra: Sedco, pp. 1–26. Harney, E. 2004. In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960–1995. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Hassan, S. 1999 [1995]. ‘The Modernist Experience in African Art: Visual Expressions of the Self and Cross-Cultural Aesthetics’, in O. Oguibe and O. Enwezor (eds), Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, pp. 214–35. Hess, J. 1998. ‘Irrational Eschatology: Nkrumahism, Post-Nkrumahism, and the Discourse of Modernity’, in N. Nzegwu (ed.), Issues in Contemporary African Art. New York: Binghamton University, pp. ­176–86. ———. 2001. ‘Exhibiting Ghana: Display, Documentary, and “National” Art in the Nkrumah Era’, African Studies Review 44(1): 59–77. July, R.W. 1987. An African Voice: The Role of the Humanities in African Independence. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jürgenson, S. 2014. ‘“Identity is a Notoriously Contested Concept”: Bernard Akoi Jackson on Africa, Accra and Amsterdam’, Metropolis M. Retrieved August 2017 from http://metropolism.com/features/ identity-is-a-notoriously-contes/. Kasfir, S.L. 1999. Contemporary African Art. New York: Thames & Hudson. Kwami, A. 2013. Kumasi Realism, 1951–2007: An African Modernism. London: Hurst. Meyer, B. 1999. Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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———. 2008. ‘Powerful Pictures: Popular Christian Aesthetics in Christian Ghana’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76(1): 82–110. ———. 2010. ‘“There is a Spirit in that Image”: Mass-Produced Jesus Pictures and Protestant-Pentecostal Animation in Ghana’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 52(1): 100–30. Meyer, B. and M. De Witte. 2012. ‘African Heritage Design: Entertainment, Media and Visual Aesthetics in Ghana’, Civilisations 61(1): 43–64. Mount, W. 1973. African Art: The Years Since 1920. Devon: Davis & Charles Holdings. Mudimbe, V-Y. 1994. ‘“Reprendre”: Enunciations and Strategies in Contemporary African Arts’, in S. Vogel (ed.), Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art. Munich: Prestel, pp. 276–87. National Commission on Culture. 2004. The Cultural Policy of Ghana. Accra: GPC/Assembly Press. Okeke-Agulu, C. 2013. ‘Contemporary African Artists and the Pan-African Imaginary: Skunder Boghossian, Kwabena Ampofo-Anti, and Victor Ekpuk’, Nka, Journal of Contemporary African Art 33: 56–69. Peterson, D.R. 2015. ‘Introduction: Heritage Management in Colonial and Contemporary Africa’, in D.R. Petersen, K. Gavua and C. Rassool (eds), The Politics of Heritage in Africa: Economies, Histories, and Infrastructures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–36. Plankensteiner, B. and N.M. Adediran. 2010. African Lace: Eine Geschichte des Handels, der Kretivität und der Mode in Nigeria. Gent and Kortrijk: Snoeck. Probst, P. 2007. ‘Picturing the Past: Heritage, Photography, and the Politics of Appearance in a Yoruba City’, in F. De Jong and M. Rowlands (eds), Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, pp. 99–126. ———. 2011. The Art of Heritage in a Yoruba City. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ———. 2012. ‘Iconoclash in the Age of Heritage’, African Arts 45(3): 10–13. Quao, N.O. 1969–1970. ‘Some Ghanaian Contemporary Artists’, BA Thesis. Kumasi: University of Science and Technology. Schauert, P. 2015. Staging Ghana: Artistry and Nationalism in State Dance Ensembles. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Schramm, K. 2007 ‘Slave Route Projects: Tracing the Heritage of Slavery in Ghana’, in F. De Jong and M. Rowlands (eds), Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, pp. 71–98. Svašek, M. 1997. ‘Identity and Style in Ghanaian Artistic Discourse’, in J.  MacClancy (ed.), Contesting Art: Art, Politics and Identity in the Modern World. Oxford and New York: Berg, pp. 27–62. UNESCO. 2003. ‘Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage’. Retrieved August 2017 from http://portal.unesco.org/

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en/ev.php-URL_ID=17716&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION= 201.html. Vieta, K.T. 2000. The Flagbearers of Ghana. Accra: ENA Publications. Woets, R. 2011. ‘“What is This?” Framing Ghanaian art from the Colonial Encounter to the Present’, PhD Dissertation. Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit. ———. 2013. ‘Blazing Conceptual Trails on the Ghanaian Artscape: The Work of Bernard Akoi-Jackson and Rasheed Akindiya’, Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art, History and Visual Culture 11: 28–48. ———. 2014. ‘The Recreation of Modern and African Art at Achimota School in the Gold Coast (1927–52)’, The Journal of African History 55: 445–65.

8 Iconic Objects

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Making Diasporic Heritage, Blackness and Whiteness in the Netherlands

Markus Balkenhol

In the Netherlands today, there is a widespread and growing sense that ‘Dutch culture’ is in jeopardy. From right-wing populists to leftist liberals, this sense of cultural ‘loss’ has prompted a return to essences – a desire for what is truly Dutch (Roodenburg 2012). The search for existential grounding has increasingly turned to cultural heritage and national history, in the hopes that they will provide anchor points for a positive identification with the Dutch nation. Across the political spectrum, initiatives for a national historical canon (presented in 2007), an embrace of the ‘Judeo-Christian’ roots of Dutch society (Van den Hemel 2013), the historical achievements of women’s and gay rights (Mepschen, Duyvendak and Tonkens 2010) and the political commitment to safeguard national cultural heritage – all of these regularly framed as ‘typically Dutch’ – can count on broad political and societal support. This entanglement of cultural authenticity and belonging has been called the ‘culturalization of citizenship’, or ‘the process by which culture (emotions, feelings, cultural norms and values, and cultural symbols and traditions, including religion) has come to play a central role in the debate on social integration’ (Duyvendak, Tonkens and Hurenkamp 2010). The desire for a positive and shared past, however, was confronted with grassroots efforts to gain recognition for the so-called ‘dark pages’ of Dutch history, complicating a straightforwardly positive identification with the nation. Black grassroots organizations have worked to move issues concerning Dutch colonialism and the Republic’s involvement in the

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transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery to the centre of nationwide controversies. These moves have given rise to a complex heritage field including grassroots organizations, state institutions such as Parliament, provincial and city governments, or courts of law, non-governmental heritage organizations, scientists and the art sector. The complexity of players and interests in this field, however, has not necessarily led to an embrace of cultural diversity or fostered more complex, hybrid and de-essentialized modes of identification: quite the opposite. Precisely this muddle, in which certainties evaporate and the ground seems to be constantly shifting, evokes an even stronger desire for firmer footing. Nor is this desire for solidity a sentiment exclusively emanating from the white mainstream. The search for true ‘Dutchness’ is matched, for example, by a desire for authentic ‘blackness’ among many Dutch people of African descent (De Witte 2014). There is, in other words, a risk that the mobilization of colonial heritage by diasporic grassroots organizations not only provides a ground to critically engage with national identity and the culturalization of citizenship, but that it also perpetuates colonial modes of identification (see Jones 2012). Here, I want to understand these entanglements of cultural heritage and identity as a relation between people (subjects) and things (objects) (Verrips 1993). The selection of cultural heritage (whether tangible or ‘intangible’) produces heritage lists – ‘symbolic gestures … (that) confer value on what is listed’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2004: 57), but such a valuation is also an engagement with the material world, an assemblage of things. The collection and safeguarding of cultural heritage, then, is a process of world-making through which people situate themselves and others in relation to the material world. Abstract concepts such as the nation can be experienced close up and become palpable in ‘national’ heritage objects such as windmills, ships or paintings. Heritage scholars have therefore turned their attention to things and their production (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). They now investigate the literal ‘making’ and ‘fabrication’ of cultural heritage ‘as a political-aesthetic and material process’ that offers ‘a privileged case to study how essences are fabricated and made real in processes of worldmaking’ (Van de Port and Meyer, this volume). This processual understanding implies an embodied relationship: people engage with cultural heritage in embodied and emotional ways. They can feel goose bumps, a sense of awe, love, hate, pride, shame and virtually all other emotions, but also literal disgust and pain, as in places like Auschwitz, Hiroshima or the slave fortress Elmina in Ghana (Schramm 2010; Waterton 2014). Moreover, whilst objects of heritage can be loved and caressed, they can also be hated and destroyed in iconoclastic attacks. Perhaps because cultural heritage regularly incites such acts of destructive passion, as well as xenophobic and nationalist sentiment, David Lowenthal has referred to cultural heritage as a ‘popular faith’, a ‘cult’, a ‘crusade’, or even as a form of ‘possession’ (Lowenthal 1998). The danger

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in using religious terms in a somewhat derogatory way, however, is to subscribe to a kind of radical secularism in which religion is conflated with irrationality and fanaticism. Of course, this does not mean that cultural heritage cannot be understood in religious terms. Indeed, I argue that religion and cultural heritage are often entangled. Avoiding a secularist position (Mahmood 2006), I take the passion of cultural heritage to be a kind of ‘secular sacred’ in which processes of heritagization and sacralization overlap and intersect (Meyer and De Witte 2013). Religion, I argue here, plays a crucial role in questions of colonial heritage and diasporic identification in the Netherlands. The worlds of the secular and the sacred merge in the figures of the ancestors in the AfroSurinamese Winti religion, also the central figures in the commemoration of slavery. They are the subject of (both private and scholarly) historical and genealogical research into historical persons concerning the names of family members, the conditions under which enslaved Africans lived and worked during slavery, and the life stories of persons of historical importance.1 At the same time, the ancestors are spiritual entities in the AfroSurinamese Winti religion. In Winti, every person passes through several stages after death to become an ancestor, who continues to intervene in the world of the living (Wooding 1972). Next to the Winti deities and Anana Keduaman Keduampon (the Creator of heaven and earth), the ancestors are the most important figures in Winti cosmology: worshipped and consulted both in private and during small or large public events. This chapter is based on two cases of diasporic heritage-making through objects that show these entanglements of the secular and the sacred: a statue and an ancestor mask. Before describing these cases in ethnographic detail below, I can say that what connects them is their iconicity. I therefore propose an iconographic approach. I argue that both statues and masks – in this particular case, but also in more general terms – can be understood as iconic objects – that is, they have certain qualities of the icon. First, iconic objects are both representations and physical artefacts. They are a symbolic referent in the semiotic sense of the signifier (which refers to some ‘real’ signified). At the same time, they depict the symbolic presence of the signified as material objects and thus become a material presence in this world. Hans Belting has called this an ‘iconic presence’, highlighting both the semantic value and the importance of materiality in religious practice (Belting 2016: 235). Statues in general depict not only historical persons (as symbols) as physical objects; they also make an absent person present. Indeed, some have argued that ‘there is a very widespread tendency among viewers of statues to confuse the representation with what it represents, the figurant with the figuré’ (Van Eck 2010: 15).2 This is why Bruno Latour (Latour 2002: 16ff.) asserts that statues can incite such destructive passions and the desire to utterly destroy them: they are taken to be not mere objects but animate beings with a life of their own. This idea of animation has

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particular importance in the case of masks. Masks, as Belting argues in his groundbreaking study Likeness and Presence, are means to not only represent the dead but to make them present again, to re-embody them in material form by way of likeness (Belting 1994). Masks create ‘iconic presence by placing another face on the body. In the case of a dead person it restores the missing face. In the case of an actor, the face itself turns into a mask, and thus conveys a picture’ (Belting 2016: 235). Through their material presence, iconic objects have the potential to make available to concrete sense experience something that is otherwise absent or abstract. In other words, they partake in an aesthetics of persuasion, which ‘brings out the pivotal role of materiality and the senses in the making of heritage’ (Van de Port and Meyer, this volume). The genesis of presence (Meyer 2012) is a potential of iconic objects, which also implies the possibility of failure: they can make something present, but they may not always do so. In fact, very often the central concern is whether they really keep the promise of re-presentation, of generating presence: am I touching, smelling, seeing, hearing, tasting ‘the real thing’? In other words, iconicity – whether religious or profane, and often these categories blur – is involved in a politics of authentication: in the question of whether an object actually makes present something that is not normally accessible to sense experience. The potential of many religious icons, for example, derives from the belief that no human was involved in their making, that they ‘fell from heaven without any intermediary, or came into being spontaneously – ‘just like that’’ (Van de Port 2011: 74). It follows that these icons fail if one is able to ‘show that a humble human … has made them’. This ‘would be to weaken their force, to sully their origin, to desecrate them’ (Latour 2002: 18). Similarly, cultural heritage often appears as naturally given, as passed down from the past directly and as embodying that past. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga has referred to this as a ‘historical sensation’, an immediate contact with the past that overwhelms and excites, and that always comes with a sense of truth and authenticity (Tollebeek and Verschaffel 1992; Ankersmit 1993). Paradoxically, while heritage is understood as a given, ‘much effort is put into the actual making of cultural heritage’ (De Witte and Meyer 2013). In fact, the very sense of an essence results from the careful ‘styling’, ‘designing’ and ‘fashioning’ of cultural heritage so as to appear naturally given. Cultural heritage is always a fabrication – although great care is often taken to conceal this process of making. Yet, production of heritage is not a stable operation, and the outcomes are quite uncertain. The movement ‘from essence to appearance’ often implies a process of disenchantment: the production of cultural heritage elevates certain cultural and religious objects, but in this process these objects often lose some of their power and become regarded as shallow renditions of a more authentic original. Such a disenchantment pertains, in particular, to religious forms that are refashioned as cultural heritage, precisely because cultural heritage implies

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the involvement of the human hand. The process of making cultural heritage often implies that objects can lose at least some of their religious power, as they are being incorporated into secular museum exhibitions and displays of cultural heritage. As Mattijs van de Port and Birgit Meyer argue in the introduction to this volume, ‘the appeal of cultural heritage often rests on its denial of being merely made-up: on its promise to provide an essential ground to social-cultural identities’ (Van de Port and Meyer, this volume). In the terminology of this volume, iconic objects are part of a politics of authentication, or the ‘process through which heritage is authorized in specific power constellations’ (Van de Port and Meyer, this volume). The cases upon which I focus are iconic objects, and as such they are surrounded by concerns about authenticity and presence. These concerns are not merely with abstract principles, but are enmeshed in political practice. That is, concerns about authenticity and presence are inextricable from processes of identification and from particular political formations on the ground. As I will show, even though, in the case of both the statue and the mask, the makers did everything ‘right’– that is, they made appealing pieces of art that were able to ‘speak’ to different audiences, the outcomes were very different. In both cases, the makers deliberately used the materiality and the design of the heritage objects as a means to connect with those who viewed them. They wanted to create iconic objects that would capture and ‘wow’ (Meyer 2016) the audience. How to explain, then, that the statue was highly contested and rejected by some, whereas the mask did not provoke such public controversy? For an answer to this question I now turn to my ethnographic investigation.

Anton de Kom In the afternoon of 24 April 2006, the Comité een waardig monument voor Anton de Kom (Committee for a dignified monument for Anton de Kom, henceforth Comité), a pressure group led by Edouard Buitenman, an Amsterdam resident of Afro-Surinamese descent, staged a protest in Amsterdam Zuidoost, a suburb of Amsterdam with a large black population (including people of Afro-Surinamese descent as well as West Africans). The group’s aim was to prevent the unveiling of a statue of Anton de Kom (*1898, Paramaribo–†1945, Neuengamme), an intellectual and political activist who is seen as the founding father of the Surinamese labour movement and the struggle against Dutch colonial rule. The group argued that the prospective statue was inappropriate because it did not ‘look like’ Anton de Kom, but rather like the colonial image of a naked, hypersexual black savage with a huge penis. Eyewitness accounts published in local and national newspapers ­describe how, at the beginning of the ceremony, a group of activists gathered around the statue, still wrapped in a Surinamese flag. The activists are shown

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Figure 8.1  Protest against De Kom statue, Amsterdam Zuidoost, 24 April 2006. © Joost van den Broek, reprinted with permission.

carrying banners with slogans such as: ‘Creation of the monument has been taken from us’ and ‘the genes of the slave masters are clearly still alive’. Another sign provided more detail: ‘[The white Dutch artist] V. Loon created A. de Kom as seen through a white lens. For us she created painful memories of 400 years of slavery’. A little boy, one observer reported, held up a sign with the words: ‘Every year I feel sorrow/because of Black Pete/ now every day/I feel incredibly stupid/because of this statue of Anton de Kom’. One can read descriptions of people repeatedly yelling: ‘Mockery [aanfluiting]’ … ‘insult [belediging]!’ Others stood in front of the statue tenaciously, arms folded over the chest, jaws clenched. The dignitaries in the official tent at the bottom of the stairs tried to keep the spirits up. Guilly Koster, master of ceremonies and a well-known media figure of Afro-Surinamese descent, scolded the white journalists who, he suggested, had come to watch black people get in a fight with black people. But in fact, one white commentator claimed, there was hardly a white journalist in sight. The official speeches continued, but it must have been difficult to concentrate on what the speakers had to say. Under the watchful eye of the police, the thirty or so activists insisted vociferously that the statue was racist. They would not let themselves be calmed down even by De Kom’s daughter, who eventually became so upset that she had to be led away in utter distress. In the end, the statue was unveiled only for a brief moment before the activists covered it again in the Surinamese flag – almost as one protectively covers a child. What they wanted to protect was not the statue, but, rather, their image of Anton de Kom.

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In the run-up to the event, awareness organization Dyadyaman had circulated pamphlets mobilizing against what they called the ‘Nazimonument’. The pamphlets showed the photoshopped statue complete with a Hitler moustache, an SS cap and a swastika armband. In a different pamphlet circulated by Buitenman’s Comité, which appealed to ‘prevent placement of racist statue’, the reasons for the protest are listed: ‘naked (slave, native [inboorling]), genitals (very pronounced), a corpse (in vertical position), chopped off hand (punishment for slaves), disfigured arm (arm of an evolving ape)’. A battle of icons if ever there was one! It is easy to imagine the reason why emotions, expressed in rather vivid imagery, were running so high. Anton de Kom is an eminent and contested figure in the history of Suriname. De Kom was born in Frimangron, a poor suburb of Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname, in 1898. His grandmother had experienced slavery herself, and was freed when slavery was abolished in the Dutch West Indian colonies in 1863. De Kom rose to fame by leading the fledgling labour movement in Suriname in the 1920s and early 1930s, as well as through his anti-colonial activism. Expelled from Suriname to the Netherlands by the colonial regime in 1933, he died in a German concentration camp in 1945, where he was imprisoned for his affiliation with a communist magazine. Ranking today among the greatest Afro-Surinamese heroes, De Kom became an icon in widely different political contexts. In the 1960s, black students in the Netherlands discovered him as a symbol for their anti-colonial struggle. In the 1980s, De Kom was appropriated by the military regime in Suriname and portrayed as a revolutionary hero who, they argued, legitimated the overthrow of the first democratic government in Suriname (Boots and Woortman 2009). De Kom is of special importance for the Afro-Surinamese diaspora in the Netherlands. When Suriname gained independence from the Netherlands in 1975, approximately 300,000 Surinamese citizens, carrying Dutch passports, moved to the Netherlands. In particular Afro-Surinamese found a place to live in Amsterdam Zuidoost, a new suburb of Amsterdam that was built in the 1960s as part of the Algemeen Uitbreidingsplan (AUP, General Expansion Scheme) for the city of Amsterdam. Upon arrival, they experienced the shock of alienation so poignantly described by Frantz Fanon in The Fact of Blackness: ‘Maman, look, a Negro; I’m scared!’ (Fanon 2008: 91). This primal scene of interpellation when Fanon arrived in France from Martinique is recognizable for many Afro-Surinamese. Upon their arrival in the Netherlands, they had considered themselves as regular subjects of the Dutch Kingdom. Confronted with a xenophobic and racist backlash against them in the Netherlands (Jones 2007, 2014), it became clear that they were, to speak with C.L.R. James, ‘in’ but not ‘of’ the nation (Hall 1996).3 And as for Fanon, for them, too, it prompted a search for identity. Embodying the foundational narratives of both Suriname and the Netherlands – the resistance against colonialism and the German occupation – De Kom became a central figure for articulating a diasporic

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identity in the Netherlands as being both Surinamese and Dutch. Since the 1980s there had been a plaque to commemorate De Kom in Amsterdam Zuidoost. In 1999, a grassroots initiative wanted a more visible and more ‘dignified’ lieu de mémoire, and petitioned for a statue of Anton de Kom in Amsterdam Zuidoost, which resulted in said statue. Emotions about this important figure were further inflamed by the broader field of colonial memory and heritage politics in the Netherlands in which the statue is enmeshed. Stanley Lo-A-Njoe of the Comité hit the nail on the head when he stated in the newspaper: ‘After the slavery memorial in Oosterpark this monument will be the second trauma that will cause a lot of pain’.4 He refers to the tumultuous unveiling of the national slavery memorial in Oosterpark, Amsterdam, in 2002, which forms the backdrop of the De Kom statue. In the early 1990s, a group of Afro-Surinamese men formed the Comité 30 Juni/1 Juli, and began to annually commemorate the colonial past in public. On 30 June 1993, the night before the traditional celebration of abolition on 1 July, several hundred people gathered on Surinameplein in Amsterdam to remember the shared past of the Netherlands and Suriname. In 1998, another initiative, the Landelijk Platform Slavernijverleden (lit. National Platform Slavery Past) to commemorate slavery on a national scale split off from this original group. Unlike the grassroots initiative on Surinameplein, they aimed for national recognition from the Dutch Parliament. The petition they submitted to the Lower House was embraced almost across the entire political spectrum, and within four years the first national memorial to commemorate the victims of the Dutch slave trade and plantation slavery was created. However, the unveiling of the memorial on 1 July 2002 is generally remembered not as a triumph but as a catastrophe. Due to security concerns5 the ceremony had been shielded from the general public and only invited guests were admitted, including representatives of black organizations as well as the Dutch Queen, the Prime Minister, several other ministers and the Mayor of Amsterdam. Hundreds of people, who had travelled to the ceremony from far and wide, full of anticipation, were not allowed near the monument. The images of desperate people attempting to pull down the barriers separating them from ‘their’ monument, and of mounted police driving them away, have burned themselves into the collective memory. This event was fresh in everyone’s mind when the statue of De Kom was unveiled. Another dimension of this heritage field is the diasporic and therefore transnational context of this statue. The protesters were a small group led by Edouard Buitenman, and Abaysa Alken of the awareness organizations Dyadyaman and Ebu-Akademiya. Both are fervent supporters of Desi Bouterse, the current president of Suriname, and their rhetoric is very similar to his. Bouterse is a strongly divisive figure both in Suriname and the Netherlands. He was one of the leaders of the military coup in 1980, and later became what some critics refer to as the ‘dictator’ of Suriname during

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the military regime (1980–1988).6 Appropriating, among others, the name of Anton de Kom, Bouterse framed the military regime in Suriname as a revolutionary act that would truly liberate Suriname from Dutch colonial rule, which according to him had not ended with formal independence in 1975. The belligerent rhetoric with which he addressed the Netherlands is echoed by Buitenman’s and Alken’s, and staging this protest must be seen in this political context. It was a statement directed to the Dutch state as well as the Surinamese political elite (mostly members of the Labour Party, PvdA) in Amsterdam Zuidoost, whom they framed as puppets of the (white) Dutch government. Like Bouterse, Buitenman and Alken employed a rhetoric of ‘either for us or against us’, a strategy to articulate a critique of white supremacy. Yet, although they tapped into a master narrative of black resistance and white oppression, the activists were not able to speak for ‘the black community’ as a whole, perhaps adding to their frustration. Many black residents of Amsterdam Zuidoost, including Hannah Belliot (dubbed in the media as the first black ‘Mayor of de Bijlmer’),7 Elvira Sweet (Belliot’s successor, also of Afro-Surinamese descent), and De Kom’s daughter Judith de Kom were not offended by the statue but were rather proud of it.8 In spite of the rhetoric in which it was framed, the iconoclasm of the Comité therefore cannot be reduced to an act of (black) resistance against (white) oppression. Indeed, the complex and contested nature of this field points to the constant shifting of existential certainties including blackness, whiteness and historical truth. The entrenchment of these identity politics, as Igor Kopytoff has famously argued, is, at least in part, a result of ‘uncertainty of identity’: ‘a person’s social identities are not only numerous, but often conflicting, and there is no clear hierarchy of loyalties that makes one identity dominant over the others’ (Kopytoff 1986: 89–90). I propose an iconographic approach as a means to reach a more nuanced understanding of the way heritage politics and processes of identification are enmeshed. As I argued above, iconoclastic attacks like that of the Comité imply a relation between people and things. It follows that understanding them means looking into how subjects (humans) relate to objects (things) (see Verrips 1993).9 What struck me most was the overwhelming anger directed at the thing itself – the so-called ‘ogre’ (although the statue was not actually destroyed). People were angry about the material (‘wood’10), and the body (‘chopped off hand’, ‘disfigured arm’, a dead corpse, a naked slave). This was not an idiosyncrasy on the part of the activist leaders but tapped into the master narratives of black victimhood that gained influence in the wake of the controversy around the National Slavery Memorial. It struck a chord with many others, including those who supported the statue, who were upset by the vivid imagery conjured by the activists. In approaching the question of how does one get so angry at an inanimate object, I suggest looking more closely at how this iconic object was made. The initiative for a monument to honour Anton de Kom as a hero for both the Netherlands and Suriname began to form in 1999, a year after

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black grassroots organizations had successfully petitioned for a national slavery memorial (1998). In a letter to Zuidoost District Council, the Eer en Herstel (Honor and Reparation) Foundation, led by Kaikusi, the AfroSurinaams Cultureel Centrum, and Hot Shot Events wrote: Several years ago, upon the request of a number of Surinamese organizations in Amsterdam, the district council has decided to name a place in Amsterdam Zuidoost after the Surinamese-Dutch freedom fighter Anton de Kom. However, it has to be noted that the location [behind the Bijlmer railway station] and the plaque (nota bene an incorrect map of Suriname of 10cm by 10cm) do not speak to the imagination [‘niet tot de verbeelding spreekt’] of the Surinamese and the Dutch community. Moreover, these organizations think that the place and the plaque do not do justice to the role and meaning of Anton de Kom in the struggle for civil rights during the colonial period in Suriname.

A broad coalition of Afro-Surinamese grassroots organizations and individuals in Amsterdam Zuidoost supported the initiative. The Afro-Surinamese chairwoman of the district council, Hannah Belliot, ­immediately embraced the idea, and a very diverse working group was given the task to carry out the project. It consisted of representatives of the prestigious art foundation Amsterdamse Fonds voor de Kunst; a local bureau for the arts, de Artotheek in Zuidoost; the local centre for urban planning Projectbureau Vernieuwing Bijlmermeer; the most renowned local cultural centre Kwakoe Podium; Surinamese entertainment organization Hot Shot Events; Afro-Surinamese foundation Stichting Eer en Herstel; the municipal Multiculturalisatie en Participatie-Bureau; Afro-Surinamese women’s foundation Uma Lampe; and the Afro-Surinamese awareness organization Ebu-Akademiya. There was an open call to artists to submit proposals for a statue. A jury, including the chairmen of Ebu-Akademiya (Abaysa Alken and Stichting Eer en Herstel (Kaikusi) and De Kom’s son, Antoine de Kom, nominated four designs – two by Afro-Surinamese artists, two by white Dutch artists – for a public voting procedure. The designs were put on display for several months in a public cultural centre in Amsterdam Zuidoost. In addition, there was an online vote. The jury verdict, combined with the result of the 2,432 public votes (both online and offline), resulted in Jikke van Loon’s design being selected. In her design, Van Loon chose an unconventional approach in which the materiality of the sculpture was of paramount importance. The assignment had been a life-sized statue, but Van Loon decided to double that size: ‘I saw how big the place is, and I wanted him to stand there prominently’.11 She also reinterpreted the assignment to make a bronze statue: Bronze is a metal. And, actually, I immediately decided to make a wooden statue because, first of all I find wood a warm material, it feels nice, and steel [sic] is often cold and hard. And I thought it matched De Kom’s character. I thought it

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Figure 8.2  Statue of Anton de Kom, Jikke van Loon 2006, wood and bronze. Photo by the author. was very special that Anton de Kom, in a time when the Surinamese was steeped with a sense of inferiority, that he could say from the bottom of his heart: No. I am worth just as much, we are equally worthy, we are all human beings.

Van Loon travelled to Suriname, where she selected a tropical hardwood tree (Gele Kabbes; Vataireopsis speciose or Vatairea guianensis). She then carved a model for the statue from the tree, and from the model the bronze statue was cast. The tree referred to De Kom’s strength, his rootedness in Suriname, and it also referred to a Dutch saying, to be cut from the right wood, which is used to express a person’s moral or social integrity. She also chose to render De Kom naked: ‘I tried to show his pride, which really comes from the inside, in his body. To me this is not a matter of dress. It’s also not expressed in a sword that you might carry with you. It’s in the way you stand, the way you are proud [fier]’. To her, a visible muscular body

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expressed both his combativeness and his vulnerability in the totalitarian systems he struggled with. The jury was initially happy with the design. As they argued, ‘Van Loon’s design [beeld] provides the best representation [verbeelding] of De Kom’s boldness, it is an image/sculpture [beeld] that will make future generations perpetually curious about the inheritance [nalatenschap] of De Kom and it is an image that will touch people from close up as well as from a distance’.12 To the surprise of the rest of the jury,13 a few weeks before the unveiling and more than a year after the jury’s decision, Edouard Buitenman decided to turn against the design and initiate the protest. How was all this turned into an issue of black and white identity? Certainly, there were problems with the selection procedure, such as unclear guidelines for the jury, the early closing of the public vote by two weeks and the role of the secretary. But how did what seemed to be technicalities turn into a racial question? Certainly, the fact that many black representatives supported the statue is no proof that racism did not play a role, but it does suggest that the issues were complex. In order to gain a better understanding of why the racial framing on the part of the protesters gained such traction, I propose to look more closely at the way in which the protest was framed. The most central argument implied in the critique of Van Loon’s design was not only that it was ‘colonial racism’, but that as a consequence, the statue did not ‘look like’ Anton de Kom. As Stanley Lo-A-Njoe of the Comté put it: ‘The monument has no likeness with De Kom. Many people are offended. This is an insult’.14 The protesters are right, in a way. How De Kom appears in the statue is indeed very unlike the iconic photographs that exist of him (Figure 8.3). In these photographs, which are well known to everyone vaguely familiar with Surinamese history, De Kom is depicted in a stately manner, wearing a hat, a suit and a tie. Stately he is known, and stately he should have been represented, the protesters argued. They also cite the assignment for the artists, which had been a ‘realistic’ depiction (i.e. not an abstract work of art). Likeness here refers not only to the statue’s lack of resemblance to De Kom’s iconic images. Kaikusi is a prominent figure in the Dutch AfroSurinamese community. He was part of the jury, and initially in favour of Van Loon’s design. Later, he turned into one of its most outspoken critics. In an interview he told me that the statue for Anton de Kom should have become a spiritual place to honour a great ancestor. It should have been a place where Afro-Surinamese could gather, commemorate or simply ventilate joy or frustrations they may have. This would have been possible, he muses, if Oumu De Kom (oumu is an Afro-Surinamese honorary title) had been standing there with a suit and a hat – that is, if he ‘looked like’ Anton de Kom. Significantly, he should also have ‘looked like’ the other statues in Amsterdam, at least those with a classicist design: I can vividly imagine that people would want to mirror themselves in [such a statue]. For instance, when I am in the city, for instance, on Munt Square,

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Figure 8.3  The Surinamese Writer and Resistance Fighter Anton de Kom (1898–1945), author and date unknown © Nationaal Archief / Collectie Spaarnestad, reprinted with permission. and I see that marvellous statue of Queen Wilhelmina, smoothly sitting on the horse  … That means something! Or you see this marvellous statue of Mister Wibaut. That means something. That emanates something!15

This comparison with other statues is echoed by the other critics. Abaysa Alken of the Comité argued in May 2006, ‘I don’t think it would occur to the Dutch to portray a great Dutch statesmen like Pieter Jelles Troelstra or Joop den Uyl in such a way’.16 Alken’s claim is that De Kom is like Troelstra (1860–1930), a Dutch lawyer, journalist and politician who gained fame as a socialist leader in 1918. As a consequence, Alken’s argument implies, De Kom, whose struggle is seen as a similar one, should be represented like Troelstra. The critics situate the statue of De Kom not only in relation to a wider national memoryscape populated by the icons of Dutch history, but they also emphasize that this is an aesthetic field in which objects and the people they represent, in order to properly belong in it, are expected to display a certain style. De Kom, in other words, should not only look like

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‘himself’ (i.e. his photograph), he should also look like the other important monuments in the Netherlands. In the wake of the unveiling, the quarrel focused increasingly on this question of style. One response to the charge of nakedness was put forward by Annet Zondervan, director of the Centrum voor Beeldende Kunst (Center for Visual Arts, CBK), also part of the jury. In an opinion piece preceding the unveiling, she blamed Buitenman and the Comité for having a ‘pitifully clouded view’ on the statue. In response to the nakedness charge, she argued: ‘compared to the revealing details of Michelangelo’s David, nothing at all is the matter here’.17 Her comment implies that the perceived ‘nakedness’ was rather a case of ‘nudity’, thus placing the statue in the tradition of art history.18 After having explained the different layers of meaning in the statue, she concludes with the question: ‘What is a good memorial in a person’s honour? Is it a naturalistic representation of someone’s appearance? Or is it a symbolic imagination of someone’s history and ideas?19 The assignment for the artist was to make an image of likeness (een gelijkend beeld), in a literal and symbolic sense. Jikke van Loon has, in my view, succeeded in this with excellence’. 20 Brought into play here by both critics and supporters is the tension between likeness and presence (Belting 1994). The critics demanded a kind of photographic truth, to be replicated in the statue. In other words, one might say that the critics demand lifelikeness, understood as a kind of photographic accuracy, a common stylistic means in the classic art of rhetoric. The Greek term enargeia means clearness, distinctness or vividness. In Aristotle’s Rhetoric, ‘a vivid representation (enargeia) puts what is discussed before the eyes of the audience by using words that signify actuality (energeia), in particular by using metaphor that represents inanimate objects as animate. Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian and Longinus all considered enargeia or vivid, lifelike representation as one of the most important means of persuasion’ (Van Eck 2010: 11). Statues often generate presence by dissolving the gap between the signifier and the signified. They look ‘real’ because they appear to actually be what they represent. ‘Speaking in rhetorical terms’, van Eck continues, ‘one could say that statues can achieve such a degree of vivid liveliness or enargeia that the representation dissolves into the living being who is represented’ (Van Eck 2010: 15). Zondervan, too, mobilizes likeness by likening the statue to other works of art. Moreover, she questions whether likeness should be limited to outward appearance, claiming that likeness can also include qualities such as inner strength, intellect, a sense of justice and vulnerability. It has become clear from the start that the De Kom controversy cannot be understood adequately in terms of a black and white conflict. In an attempt to make sense of the subject positions emerging in this conflict, I have suggested looking at how people relate to things. Understanding the statue as an iconic object, I have shown that subject positions of blackness and whiteness emerge in relation to the materiality of the statue. Such

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racial categories are social constructions, but by looking in detail at how they emerge through an engagement with iconic objects it becomes clear how they can be experienced as real and incontestable. Categories of blackness and whiteness emerge, in other words, through a complex politics of ­authentication and an aesthetics of persuasion in which the material form of the statue is of eminent importance. In this case, there are two ­competing ways of producing iconicity at play, both mobilizing the two dimensions of iconic objects: materiality and the notion of authenticity. Whereas both aim for the same goal, generating an enduring presence of what they agree is an iconic figure for both Suriname and the Netherlands, the different strategies of persuasion and authentication are fundamentally at odds. As I have argued above, the context of diasporic, transnational politics is crucial in understanding the timing of this protest. The protesters clearly saw the unveiling of the statue, and the media attention this generated, as a golden opportunity to push their political agenda. This makes their protest all the more interesting, because it underlines the importance of ‘doing politics with things’: the statue as a material presence and the master narrative of black oppression and white supremacy were instrumental in raising the profile of their political position. In a sense, it was the statue that made their arguments persuasive for some, and misguided for others. I will now turn to a different iconic object, which intervenes in the same field of diasporic heritage, but with a markedly different result.

Kabra When the statue of Anton de Kom was unveiled, another iconic object was already in the making. I am talking of a kabra (ancestor) mask, a newly invented ancestor mask that sought to introduce the use of such masks in the Afro-Surinamese Winti religion in the Netherlands. In 1998 Marian Markelo (her Ghanaian chiefly title is Nana Efua Mensah, which she received during one of her frequent visits to Ghana), an influential priestess of the Afro-Surinamese Winti religion in the Netherlands, received a message from her ancestors. In their message, the ancestors assigned Markelo to ‘bring back’ the sculptural tradition in the practice of Winti. That tradition, the ancestors argued, had been lost during the Middle Passage and slavery, and it was now time to restore this tradition in honour (‘in ere herstellen’). I entered the project in late 2013, when I was asked to act as the project’s ‘chronicler’. At that point, there was already quite a history to look back upon. Thirteen years after receiving the ancestral message, Markelo had become acquainted with Boris van Berkum, a Dutch artist based in Rotterdam. Van Berkum had just finished a solo exhibition at the prestigious Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in the city. He described to me their first meeting at a Winti Prey (a Surinamese Creole term referring to Winti worship) as a ‘magical moment’, in which Markelo, guided by her African

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ancestors, chose Van Berkum as a partner in the project they came to call an ‘African Renaissance’ in the Winti religion (Balkenhol 2015). In 2011 and 2012, Van Berkum made six ceramic sculptures of the Winti mother-goddess Mama Aisa. However, the African-inspired sculptures he initially produced did not stand the test of ritual deployment when Markelo and Van Berkum used them in a Winti Prey. The ritual had been well prepared. The event was organized at Van Berkum’s studio on Brienenoordeiland near Rotterdam, an island in the Maas River, which reminded Markelo of the river islands in Suriname; the sculptures had turned out beautifully, and could certainly serve as spiritual objects (indeed, one of the sculptures is now part of Markelo’s private altar). Nonetheless, they were not yet ‘perfect’: they did not have the spiritual presence Van Berkum had aimed for. The sculptures, he said, were too static, just sitting there on the altar. They ought to be more dynamic, more ‘alive’. During the ritual Van Berkum did, however, have a vision of how the sculptures could be perfected. In his vision, he saw people dancing and wearing sculptures on top of their heads. ‘I thought it would be more powerful if the sculptures were kinetic: moving instead of static. If they could actually dance among people. Perhaps there was still too much of me in them, too much of my own interpretation’, Van Berkum told me. In other words, the reintroduction of religious art necessitated a degree of artistic creativity and imagination, but as with many commissioned artworks there were also limits to artistic freedom. As I will show below, these limits first and foremost concerned the material form of the object. Their project included not only the reintroduction of sculpture to the Winti religion, but also the safeguarding of African heritage in the Netherlands. In 2013, Van Berkum and Markelo collected more than 1,200 signatures against the commercial sale of the Rotterdam World Museum’s Africa collection. The project received the name Ik Ben Niet te Koop (I am not for sale), a creed against slavery in general, and in particular against the ‘unlawful sale of the Africa collection by World Museum director, Stanley Bremer, which the campaign described as a waste of cultural heritage, ­asserting that the collection belong to the people of Rotterdam, of which 20 per cent have African roots’. 21 ‘Then it dawned on me’, Van Berkum explained to me, ‘we needed to go where the African ancestors live in the Netherlands – in the great African collections of Dutch museums’. In making this connection, Van Berkum concluded that safeguarding African heritage in the Netherlands and reintroducing sculpture to the Winti religion were two sides of the same coin. The project therefore approached the Africa Museum in Berg en Dal, where they visited the collection of Yoruba masks in the museum’s depot. 22 Guided by the ‘spiritual character’ of the objects, Markelo and Van Berkum selected six Yoruba masks. The valuable wooden masks had to remain in the museum, but Markelo and Van Berkum were not seeking to acquire one of the original masks. They were looking for a ‘contemporary’ (‘eigentijdse’)

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ancestor mask. For their project, simply preserving the wooden originals proved insufficient. The new mask needed to meet present standards, and cater to present needs. The mask that had ‘worked’ for the ancestors would no longer work in the present, but the project nevertheless needed to make the ancestors present, too. Van Berkum achieved this production of presence in the present with 3D technology. They found 3D Match Europe, a company that normally produces scans for medical purposes, which uses the slogan, ‘make your imagination reality’. The company performed a laser scan of the masks using a portable Artec 3D scanner, a device that dissolves a material object into ‘point cloud coordinates’, a mass of raw data that digitally defines the shape of the object. The raw data was computer-rendered, and then a replica mask was milled in polyurethane foam. Six masks were scanned, and the computer-rendered images of two masks were used to produce one 1.5 meter high dancing mask (‘Papa Winti’), one six meter high sculpture of Mama Aisa (‘Mama Aisa XXXL’) and a 66 x 40 x 40cm Kabra mask, upon which I will focus here. The model for this particular mask (9 x 17.5 x 20.5cm) originated in the Yoruba region in Nigeria and is a wooden anthropomorphic mask with large halfmoon shaped eyes and an iron earring. It was used in the Egungun (lit. ‘mask’) cult, a secret society of masqueraders. Egun masks were used in

Figure 8.4  A Yoruba mask being scanned. © Boris van Berkum, reprinted with permission.

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Figure 8.5  The raw data being rendered. © Boris van Berkum, reprinted with permission.

ancestor worship (Beier 1958), but they were also part of secular theatrical performances at the Royal Court (Adedeji 1972). The Kabra mask needed to be a sensation. The new mask is considerably larger than the wooden original. What remained of that mask was only its shape. The most striking change is the mask’s size: ‘The original model was too small, it would not have produced the kind of presence [aanwezigheid] we were looking for’, Van Berkum explained. ‘In an African village, you have maybe thirty people, but we were looking for a public of 300 and more. And it also has to do well on television’. Van Berkum also radically changed the appearance of the mask: instead of the original mask’s dark colour he applied transparent polyurethane varnish, through which the light beige (or, as it was perceived by many, ‘white’) colour of the polyurethane foam is visible. On top of the varnish, Van Berkum blew brass powder and then sanded it off so that only goldencoloured dots are visible on the mask’s surface. The mask is dressed in blue and white persie cloth, which is glued on top of its head, thus echoing a head tie. Around the neck, the mask wears a collar of tulle hiding a wooden structure so it can be worn on top of the head. The dancer wearing it can see through the tulle collar. As a religious object the mask is also political. It is an intervention in debates about belonging, citizenship and cultural heritage in the

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Figure 8.6  The mask being milled in polyurethane foam. © Boris van Berkum, reprinted with permission.

Netherlands. The mask made one of its first public appearances at the ceremony to commemorate the 150th anniversary of abolition in 2013. In the audience was Annemarie de Wildt, curator at the Amsterdam Museum. She immediately resolved to acquire the mask for the museum’s permanent collection, because, she argued, the mask not only referred to the history of the city, but since it had been present at this historic event it had now itself become part of that history, and thus part of the cultural heritage of the city. That decision was also made in the context of recent policies to make museums more ‘diverse’. The mask is now part of the museum’s collection, but it also remains a religious object that is used in Winti rituals. It is an object that moves in and out of the museum, and thus also between the realms of cultural heritage, religion and art. The mask has become an iconic object in the sense I outlined in the introduction. This begs the question about the constituency of this object:

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Figure 8.7  Kabra ancestor dance mask, Boris van Berkum, 2013. Lacquered polyurethane foam, textile, wood. 66 x 40 x 40 cm. Collection Amsterdam Museum. Photo Erik Hesmerg. Reprinted with permission.

who considers this an iconic image? The mask is certainly successful in the public sphere. It is now a permanent part of the national commemoration of abolition; it featured in the recent documentary Traces of Sugar (Ida Does, 2017), and Van Berkum is now involved in a new project creating a statue of the Winti Goddess Mama Aisa. However, the mask is an object in the making, and the future will show if it indeed succeeds in ‘reintroducing’ sculpture as a permanent part of Winti practice. In this chapter, I therefore focus on this process of making and the people directly involved in it. As in the case of the De Kom statue, the mask project is concerned with aesthetics: great care is taken to make it appeal to the body and the senses. As a material object, it is geared towards generating presence – namely, that of the ancestors and an ‘African’ past. Hans Belting has argued that masks, and masks representing the dead or the ancestors in particular, have the capacity to make the dead present again by way of likeness. The mask generates presence because of its material form. Thanks to the technology

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used, the outer shape replicates that of the West African wooden mask to within a fraction of a millimetre. The shape, rather than the material, is what enables the ‘collaboration’ with the ancestors. The mask is also an iconic object because of its concern with authenticity. However, the evaluation of human involvement is somewhat more ambiguous than with acheiropoieta, in which the involvement of the human hand is looked at with ‘chagrin’ (Van de Port 2011: 74). In this case, the literal process of designing and styling cultural heritage is itself a process of enchantment. Let me therefore briefly look at the role of ­technology in the fabrication of the mask. The mask is part of a particular narrative, and it arrives at a particular point in this narrative, like a deus ex machina, which, in the words of Jeremy Stolow (2012: 1), is ‘a conveniently perfect solution … for an otherwise inextricable problem in the story through the insertion of an entirely unexpected character, object, or event’. In this case, the ‘problem’ of the plot is the link between the present and an ‘African’ past, a link that is missing as a consequence of the Middle Passage. The mask seems to offer precisely such an ‘entirely unexpected character, object, or event’ that, it is hoped, will redress that terminal loss. The term ‘technology’ here refers to fabrication, to something that is made. Technology has often been seen as contradicting divine presence: ‘Apparently, authentic divine presence, if it is to remain authentic, is not supposed to manifest itself as an instrument in the service of the human hand’ (Stolow 2012: 2). In the case of the mask, in contrast technology is very much present and indeed is foregrounded. Boris van Berkum highlights the use of technology because, according to him, this technology is precisely what produces an immediacy that is otherwise impossible. Once, he and I had a heated discussion – indeed, almost an argument – about the term ‘copy’. 23 I used the term in one of my texts about the mask, but Van Berkum disagreed. ‘It is not a copy’, he insisted, ‘it is my collaboration with the ancestors’. This was not possible with the figures he had initially made that failed the ritual test. The 3D technology, on the other hand, provided more immediacy: ‘the technology is neutral’, he told me. To him, there is no interpretation, no will of an artist that may lead astray, away from the material of the ancestors. The technology, he argued, ‘has no will of its own’, and therefore provides the highest degree of immediacy. But to Van Berkum, this is precisely why this technology needs to be highlighted, not rejected. Indeed, the entire narrative framing of the mask depends on this technology. The ‘African’ visual arts are framed as an absence, as objects that are utterly irretrievable, a loss that is framed as final because they have been removed from their original cultural context. Similar to the better-known ‘roots’ journeys to African ancestral villages, technology here takes centre stage, because it holds the promise to do something that is, according to the laws of physics, ­impossible – namely, to turn back time. Hence, redressing the Middle

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Passage requires not physics but an intervention of the spirit world, and technology is capable of providing such an intervention. In this understanding, ‘African’ heritage can only be brought to us with the involvement of the spirits. Unlike other forms of roots journeys, this is not a straightforwardly secular enterprise that relies on ‘rational science’ (DNA testing, historical and genealogical research, etc.) – it is only within the ‘enchanted’ frame of Winti religion that the project makes sense. There is another strategy of authentication – namely, the figure of the artist himself. His involvement in the project is sanctioned spiritually, since the ancestors have pointed Markelo in his direction. Without having met before, Markelo immediately knew that Van Berkum was to be her partner in this project. Not only was there a spiritual connection, but the ancestors literally told her to work together. Van Berkum had been open to religious experience in other cultural contexts. He is a member of a Santo Daime church in Rotterdam, and he is currently involved in a calligraphy project with an Iranian master calligrapher. He incorporates these influences into his art. Being chosen by the ancestors, however, also entailed a lot of work. In 2015, Van Berkum and Markelo spent several weeks on a retreat in Suriname, where Van Berkum underwent countless initiation and purification rituals. In contrast to Van Loon, Van Berkum has not only immersed himself in Afro-Surinamese history and culture, he has become a religious practitioner himself. Not only the artist but also the mask itself is spiritually authorized. In the museum, for instance, the ancestors guided Markelo to the masks that were eventually selected. Indeed, Markelo and Van Berkum involved the ancestors in the entire process of making the masks. Before they could be scanned to become ‘contemporary’ ancestor masks, the ancestors had to be asked for permission. This authorization is crucial, because the present use of the mask differs in many respects from the way it was used by the Egungun cult. For instance, the Egun masks were usually images of specific ancestors; the masks themselves had names, referring to their shape or their particular task (Beier 1958). The ‘contemporary’ mask, in contrast, refers to the ancestors as a category. It is a generic mask, not dedicated to any ancestor in particular. Since this is an entirely new invention, only time will tell whether the makers immerse themselves deeper into the historical context of the mask. That this has happened only to a limited degree until now underlines the importance placed on design and style rather than African (art) history (see below). Compared to the statue of Anton de Kom, the mask as an object is comparatively uncontroversial. Rivalries exist to some extent between Winti priestesses, and the mask is certainly entangled in these. The theological details of how these politics play out will be the subject of future research. Important for the present argument is that so far the mask has become a successful iconic object that fascinates many in the Winti community, in the museum world, in society at large and, not least, in academia.

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Two aspects are central in this success: the narrative framing of the mask and its style. First, the mask is presented as a ‘missing link’ between the diasporic present and the ‘African’ past. The mask promises to bridge a multiple gap – geographic, temporal, cultural, religious – by providing a material body of the ancestors that can be experienced in the present. The narrative frame is the master narrative of the black Atlantic, with the Middle Passage and the slave experience as central referents (see Gilroy 1993). Such a framing immediately makes sense in a context where slavery and its abolition have been at the centre of the cultural politics of belonging in the Netherlands and beyond. Second, the mask’s style speaks to a related quest for ‘Africanness’ and the stylistic repertoire that goes along with this quest. Marleen de Witte has shown how young people’s search for a diasporic identity and ‘African’ roots is embedded in a particular stylistic canon of ‘Africanness’, including, for instance, such elements as Kente cloth and ‘traditional dance’. 24 Like Kente and wax print cloth, African masks can be counted among those ‘easily identifiable signifiers of a generic Africanness’ (De Witte 2014: 282) that have a long tradition in the black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993). The Kabra mask playfully relates to these tropes. Based on a West African wooden mask, it retains only the form (important as this is). The rest becomes a ‘contemporary’ ancestor mask that stylistically breaks with and transcends the West African original. All of this does not mean that the mask is entirely uncontested. When the project was presented, some questioned the fact that a white artist made the mask. Could Markelo not have found a black artist to make the mask? Should an event of such importance not be carried out by the black community, without the involvement of whites? Moreover, these critics were concerned by the mask’s ‘skin colour’. That is, the beige colour – the original colour of the polyurethane foam – that is visible through the varnish was read by some observers as ‘white skin colour’. Surely, the ancestors could not have been white? Why was this symbol for the black community ‘white’?25 Markelo brushes these comments off with the argument that the mask shows the ancestors’ bones, not their skin. Moreover, she adds, all bones are white, and this is a shared history, so there is no reason why a white artist should not make an ancestor mask. Markelo here makes a ‘post-racial’ argument, framing the project as an attempt to overcome the idea of essential identity. There is much to say about the broader politics of blackness and whiteness in which such arguments are embedded, but I cannot treat this here in more detail. What is important to note here, however, is that unlike the case of the De Kom statue, these debates have so far taken place behind closed doors. Criticism has been articulated in personal conversations rather than in the form of public spectacles. I would venture to say that this has everything to do with the Winti way of doing politics with things: in secrecy (Thoden van Velzen and Van Wetering 2004).

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Conclusion These debates about the ‘whiteness’ of the mask and the artist bring us back to the central concern of this volume: ‘if histories, communities, traditions and identities are fabricated, how then is it that people manage to convince themselves and others that this is not the case?’ (Van de Port and Meyer, this volume). Both the statue and the mask are part of the politics of cultural heritage and culturalization in the Netherlands. Both heritage projects have aimed to intervene in a heritage field where, more often than not, all parties involved frame History (with a capital H), community and tradition as incontestable. The aim of both projects was to transcend the desire for unchanging essences. In the case of De Kom, it was a broad coalition of individuals and organizations who wanted to create a powerful symbol of a shared history that would represent and appeal to both white and black residents of Amsterdam Zuidoost. Similarly, the kabra mask redresses the historical rupture of the Middle Passage and plantation slavery without romanticizing a prelapsarian past of authentically ‘African’ tradition that has long preoccupied black Atlantic discourse (Gilroy 1993). Their success, however, was mixed. The question imposing itself is why the outcome of the two cases of heritage-making differs so drastically, in particular since the parameters were not so different to start with. Both artists have delved into the history of slavery and colonialism in Suriname, familiarizing themselves deeply with their subject matter. Both have devised new and unusual ways to work with materials so as to generate presence, one by importing a huge slab of tropical hardwood, the other by 3D imaging. In both cases, likeness was put into play so as to generate presence. As I have suggested in my analysis, the reasons for the different outcomes are complex, and cannot be pinned down to an easy formula. The mask certainly benefits from the religious authority Marian Markelo can mobilize. Her influence as a religious figure ensured a high status for the mask project from the start. The mask project is seen as a collaboration between herself and Van Berkum, pre-empting accusations of white colonization. Moreover, and perhaps more coincidentally than anything else, the mask did not become a focus of local and diasporic politics to the extent as did the statue of Anton de Kom. Another insight towards explaining the different outcomes of the two projects may be found in their iconicity. Unlike the De Kom statue, the Kabra mask did not have to compete with an already established image. De Kom’s iconicity is very closely linked to the photographic images showing him as a ‘civilized man’. Van Loon’s design clashed with this image, and inspired a battle of icons on these grounds. The mask did not have such already existing icons to compete with: its challenge is precisely this lack of iconic predecessors. In Winti practice, there are no masks. Ancestors

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have no images but generally manifest themselves by taking possession of people, usually in the context of religious rituals. The status of the mask in this context is a process of negotiation. The mask is not itself an animated object through which the ancestors become manifest, but its presence has in some cases stimulated their appearance in possession. The mask is almost certain to lead to theological debates about the role of images in Winti, even though, so far, these debates have taken place out of the public eye. These debates have paled, however, before the mask’s broad appeal as an iconic object that resonates with popular images of ‘Africa’ and ancestrality. My iconographic approach in this chapter has made some mileage towards an explanation of why and how a strong emphasis on cultural essences, incontestables and truth can go hand in glove with the conscious construction of cultural heritage and identity. By looking closely into the ways in which people relate to things, I have shown that the statue and the mask are situated in a wider aesthetic field in which ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ emerge in the embodied, emotionally charged relations between people and things. The cases have also shown, however, that processes of persuasion and authentication are quite volatile. It is almost impossible to predict the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of a heritage project by simple formulas. Even where heritage-makers try to ‘do it right’ there is no guarantee that the heritage thus produced will ‘work’. Even if the makers pay keen attention to the material presence of heritage objects, or, to put it in the words of this volume, where they engage deeply in the politics of authentication and aesthetics of persuasion, the product can blow up in their faces. The outcome of a heritage project, then, is not in the eye of the beholder or in the object itself, but in the relation between them – a relation that is always political. Markus Balkenhol is a social anthropologist working on issues of colonialism, race, citizenship, cultural heritage and religion. His PhD thesis, ‘Tracing Slavery: An Ethnography of Diaspora, Affect, and Cultural Heritage in Amsterdam’ (2014), as well as recent articles in Social Anthropology, Material Religion, and African Diaspora (among others) deal with the afterlives of colonialism and slavery in the Netherlands. He is currently affiliated with Meertens Institute as a postdoctoral research fellow.

Notes   1. One prominent example is Elisabeth Samson, a successful black businesswoman in the eighteenth century, and the protagonist of a widely read novel by the AfroSurinamese writer Cynthia McLeod.

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  2. I take the word ‘confuse’ here not to mean that viewers are ‘confused’ and hence have misunderstood, but in a technical sense to mean the mixing of signifier and signified. Rather than a failure to recognize how things ‘really’ are on the part of the viewers, this implies a critique of De Saussure’s notion of the sign, in which reality and its representation are neatly separated.   3. As Mimi Sheller has argued, ‘Although the Caribbean lies at the heart of the western hemisphere and was historically pivotal in the rise of Europe to world predominance, it has nevertheless been spatially and temporally eviscerated from the imaginary geographies of “Western modernity”. The imagined community of the West has no space for the islands that were its origin, the horizon of its self-perception, the source of its wealth … As C. L. R. James once put it, the Caribbean is “in but not of the West”’ (Sheller 2003: 1).  4. ‘Dit standbeeld wordt na het Slavernijmonument in het Oosterpark een tweede trauma dat veel pijn gaat veroorzaken, zegt Stanley Lo-A-Njoe van het (Comité Een Waardig Standbeeld Anton de Kom)’. Rob Rombouts, Het Parool, 7 April 2006, Binnenland: 2.   5. The unveiling took place less than ten months after 9/11, and less than two months after the murder of Pim Fortuyn, an event that is seen as a turning point in Dutch history (Stengs 2011).  6. Several human rights violations took place under Bouterse’s rule, most infamous among them the so-called December Murders, an act of political violence in which fifteen critical politicians, journalists, lawyers and union leaders were tortured and brutally killed. Bouterse was charged with these murders in 2000, but the court case has dragged on for more than a decade. Since Bouterse became the Surinamese president in 2010, and the adoption of an amnesty for the suspects, the case has been more or less on hold. All of this has certainly heightened emotions.   7. Jan Landman, ‘De Burgemeester van de Bijlmer’. Bijeen January 2001: 6–9.   8. ‘Ik ben trots op de realisatie van dit beeld. Het gaat om een initiatief dat is ondernomen door de bevolking. Het Anton de Komplein wordt het toonaangevende plein van Zuidoost en wordt terecht vereerd met een beeld van zijn naamgever’. Elvira Sweet quoted in Marianna Duff, Het Parool 20 January 2005, Amsterdam: 19.   9. To be entirely clear, this is not to reintroduce a colonial and racialized distinction between rational and primitive thought. Rather, I follow Jojada Verrips and others (Latour, Smith and Weintraub 2010; Meyer 2012) in arguing that ‘the world of objects evokes ever more magical-mythical phantasies that are incorrect objectively speaking, but essentially correct in terms of the quality and working, because the differentiation between people (subjects) and things (objects) diminishes’ (Verrips 1993: 61). 10. The statue is a bronze statue, but the statue was hewn from a slab of tropical hardwood from which the bronze was then cast. The bronze thus retained the surface structure and appearance of the wood. 11. The following quotes are taken from the short documentary about the statue: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkLsKi-TSEQ (accessed 16 August 2016). 12. ‘In de ogen van de jury geeft het beeld van Jikke van Loon de beste verbeelding van het strijdbare karakter van De Kom, is het een beeld dat toekomstige generaties blijvend nieuwsgierig maakt naar de nalatenschap van De Kom én is het een beeld dat mensen van dichtbij en veraf weet te raken’. Marianna Duff, Het Parool, 20 January 2005, Amsterdam: 19. 13. Harold Schouten, ‘Beeld de Kom zal altijd blijven boeien’, Het Parool, Meningen 27; Jury Press Release, 21 April 2006. 14. ‘Het beeld vertoont geen gelijkenis met De Kom. Veel mensen worden gekrenkt. Dit is een belediging’. Rob Rombouts, Het Parool, 7 April 2006, Binnenland: 2. 15. ‘En ik kan me levendig voorstellen dat mensen zich daar aan willen spiegelen. Als ik bijvoorbeeld in de stad ben ik zie, bijvoorbeeld bij de Munt, en ik zie daar een

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prachtig beeld van koningin Wilhelmina zo half schuijn zo op dat paard. Dat zegt wat! Of je ziet dat prachtige beeld van meneer Wibaut. Dat zegt wat! Dat straalt iets uit’. (interview 4 May 2011). 16. ‘Daarnaast denk ik ook niet dat Nederlanders het in hun hoofd zouden halen om grote Nederlandse staatsmannen als Pieter Jelles Troelstra of Joop den Uyl op een dergelijke manier af te beelden’. 17. Annet Zondervan, 2006, ‘Symboliek beeld De Kom verkeerd begrepen. Aangevoerde ‘bewijzen’ van racisme getuigen van een jammerlijk vertroebelde blik’. Het Parool, Meningen, 20 April 2006: 12. 18. Art historians are familiar with this distinction between nakedness and nudity introduced by art historian Kenneth Clark, who, in 1956, held that nakedness implied ‘some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition’, whereas the nude ‘carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone’. Or, as art critic John Berger put it: ‘Nudity is a form of dress’. 19. The Dutch term ‘verbeelding’ goes further than the English ‘imagination’. Verbeelding also includes the material process of making a physical image (beeld), literally ­image-ing. 20. Annet Zondervan, 2006, ‘Symboliek beeld De Kom verkeerd begrepen. Aangevoerde ‘bewijzen’ van racisme getuigen van een jammerlijk vertroebelde blik’. Het Parool, Meningen, 20 April 2006, p. 12. ‘Wat is een goed monument ter ere van een persoon? Is het een naturalistische weergave van iemands uiterlijk? Of is het een symbolische verbeelding van iemands geschiedenis en gedachtegoed? De opdracht aan de kunstenaar was een gelijkend beeld te maken, in uiterlijke en in figuurlijke zin. Jikke van Loon is daar, in mijn ogen, uitstekend in geslaagd’. 21. http://aban.nl/ik-ben-niet-te-koop/ (accessed 15 August 2016). 22. The museum was founded in 1954 by the Holy Ghost Fathers (Congregatie van de H. Geest). Its original collection was established by the Congregation’s missionaries so as to give a broader view on the lifeworlds of the people in the areas in which they worked. Later this collection was expanded through acquisitions and donations. 23. The point I wanted to make in that conversation has recently been aptly formulated by Maruška Svašek: ‘practices of copying and reproduction should not be placed in opposition to creativity, but conceptualized as part and parcel of the creative process’ (Svašek and Meyer 2016). 24. In fact, the dance group performing with the mask is led by Otmar Watson, the central figure in De Witte’s ethnographic account. 25. This links up with complex debates about the skin colour of Jesus, which has a long tradition, especially in the North American civil rights discourse.

References Adedeji, Joel A. 1972. ‘The Origin and Form of the Yoruba Masque Theatre’. Cahiers d’Études Africaines 12(46): 254–76. Ankersmit, F.R. 1993. De Historische Ervaring. Groningen: Historische Uitgeverij. Asad, T. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Balkenhol, M. 2015. ‘Working with the Ancestors: The Kabra Mask and the “African Renaissance” in the Afro-Surinamese Winti Religion’. Material Religion 10(2): 251–254. Beier, H.U. 1958. ‘The Egungun Cult among the Yorubas’, Présence Africaine 18/19: 33–36.

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Belting, H. 1994. Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2005. ‘Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology’, Critical Inquiry 31(2): 302–19. ———. 2016. ‘Iconic Presence: Images in Religious Traditions’, Material Religion 12(2): 235–37. Boots, A. and R. Woortman. 2009. Anton de Kom: Biografie 1898–1945, 1945–2009. Amsterdam: Contact. Casanova, J. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. De Witte, M. 2014. ‘Heritage, Blackness and Afro-Cool’, African Diaspora 7(2): 260–89. De Witte, M. and B. Meyer. 2013. ‘African Heritage Design’, Civilisations 61(3): 43–64. Duyvendak, J.W., E.H. Tonkens and M. Hurenkamp. 2010. ‘Culturalization of Citizenship in the Netherlands’, in A. Chebel d’Appollonia, and S.  Reich (eds), Managing Ethnic Diversity after 9/11: Integration, Security, and Civil Liberties in Transatlantic Perspective. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 233–52. Fanon, F. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press. Gilroy, P. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Hall, S. 1996. ‘When Was “the Post-Colonial”? Thinking at the Limit’, in I. Chambers and L. Curti (eds), The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons. London: Routledge, pp. 242–60. Jones, G. 2007. Tussen Onderdanen, Rijksgenoten En Nederlanders: Nederlandse Politici over Burgers Uit Oost En West En Nederland, 1945–2005. Amsterdam: Rozenberg. ———. 2012. ‘De Slavernij Is Onze Geschiedenis (Niet): Over de Discursieve Strijd Om de Betekenis van de Ntr- Televisieserie De Slavernij’, BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review 127(4): 56–82. ———. 2014. ‘Biology, Culture, “Postcolonial Citizenship” and the Dutch Nation, 1945–2007’, in P. Essed and I. Hoving (eds), Dutch Racism. Leiden: Brill. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. 1998. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ———. 2004. ‘Intangible Heritage as Metacultural Production’, Museum International 56(1–2): 52–65. Kopytoff, I. 1986. ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania 64–91. Latour, B. 2002. ‘What is Iconoclash?’, in B. Latour and P. Weibel (eds), Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art. Karlsruhe: ZKM Center for Art and Media.

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Latour, B., B. Smith and E. Weintraub. 2010. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lowenthal, D. 1998. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mahmood, S. 2006. ‘Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation’, Public Culture 18(2): 323. ———. 2008. ‘Secular Imperatives?’ Public Culture 20(3): 461–65. Mepschen, P., J.W. Duyvendak and E.H. Tonkens. 2010. ‘Sexual Politics, Orientalism and Multicultural Citizenship in the Netherlands’, Sociology 44(5): 962–79. Meyer, B. 2016. ‘How to Capture the “Wow”: R.R. Marett’s Notion of Awe and the Study of Religion’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22(1): 7–26. ———. 2012. Mediation and the Genesis of Presence: Towards a Material Approach to Religion. Utrecht: Utrecht University. Meyer, B. and M. De Witte. 2013. ‘Heritage and the Sacred: Introduction’, Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief 9(3): 274–80. Roodenburg, H.W. 2012. ‘“De Nederlandsheid” van Nederland: Een Nieuw Project Aan Het Meertens Instituut’, Volkskunde: Tijdschrift over de Cultuur van Het Dagelijkse Leven 113. Schramm, K. 2010. African Homecoming: Pan-African Ideology and Contested Heritage. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Sheller, M. 2003. Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies, International Library of Sociology. London: Routledge. Stengs, I. 2011. ‘Ephemeral Memorials: Commemorative Rituals upon Violent Death in the Public Domain II: The Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh Memorial Sites’, in P. Post, A.L. Meulendijk and J.E.A. Kroesen (eds), Sacred Places in Modern Western Culture. Leuven: Peeters, pp. 247–52. Stolow, J. 2012. Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between. New York: Fordham University Press. Svašek, M. and B. Meyer. 2016. Creativity in Transition: Politics and Aesthetics of Cultural Production across the Globe. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Taylor, C. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thoden van Velzen, H.U.E. and I. Wetering. 2004. In the Shadow of the Oracle: Religion as Politics in a Suriname Maroon Society. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Tollebeek, J. and T. Verschaffel. 1992. De Vreugden van Houssaye: Apologie van de Historische Interesse, Historische Reeks. Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek. Van de Port, M. 2011. ‘(Not) Made by the Human Hand: Media Consciousness and Immediacy in the Cultural Production of the Real’, Social Anthropology 19(1): 74–89.

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Van den Hemel, E. 2013. ‘The Noble Lie: “Judeo-Christian Roots” and the Rise of Conservative Nationalism in the Netherlands’, in R. Braidotti, E. Midden and B. Blaagaard (eds), Postsecular Publics: Transformations of Religion and the Public Sphere. London: Palgrave. Van Eck, C. 2010. ‘Living Statues: Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency, Living Presence Response and the Sublime’, Art History 33(4): 3–19. Verrips, J. 1993. ‘Het Ding “Wilde” niet Wat Ik Wilde: Enige Notities over Moderne Vormen van Animisme in Westerse Samenlevingen’, Etnofoor 6(2): 59–79. Waterton, E. 2014. ‘A More-Than-Representational Understanding of Heritage? The “Past” and the Politics of Affect’, Geography Compass 8(11): 823–33. Wooding, C.J. 1972. Winti, Een Afro-Amerikaanse Godsdienst in Suriname. Meppel: Krips Repro.

9 Ascertaining the Future Memory of Our Time

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Dutch Institutions Collecting Relics of National Tragedy

Irene Stengs

In the Netherlands, as in many places elsewhere in the world, the site of a violent public death usually becomes a rapidly expanding memorial. Such a memorial, generally consisting of flowers, letters, drawings, photographs, candles and cuddly toys brought by individual citizens, is the locus where the public emotions ensuing the violence are visualized and take material shape. In the slipstream of this relatively recent form of commemorative culture (see Walter 2008), it has become common practice to collect and preserve part of the commemorative material produced at these sites. The higher the societal impact of the lethal incident, the stronger the urge to preserve the materials and to include them in the collections of museums, governmental archives or academic institutions.1 Such institutional collecting makes commemorative material a particular form of heritage that needs to be kept for exhibition and research, at present or in the future. The trend towards preserving commemorative material should be understood against the background of the only alternative: disposal. The act of disposing of such materials appears to be increasingly experienced as problematic. It may be felt as insensitive, offensive or even immoral. Preservation, on the contrary, comes across as compassionate, caring and conscious historical responsibility. One might think that the latter qualities make preservation and collecting appear unambiguously justifiable. This, however, is not always the case. In this contribution, I demonstrate how such collecting is permeated with ambiguities and contradictions.

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Contradiction is most poignant, however, in another category of materials that come into view as a potential testimony of what happened. We may think here of material that directly relates to the perpetrators: in particular, lethal weapons. The question of whether to preserve or to destroy such items is a recurring issue. With this chapter, I seek a better understanding of the growing urge to preserve materials pertaining to violent death in the public domain. In scholarly work on commemorative culture and memorial sites (Santino 2006; Sturken 2007; Doss 2010; Margry and Sánchez-Carretero 2011), this topic has received relative limited analytic attention so far. Addressing the complex relationship between commemorative culture and processes of heritage formation, I introduce two concepts that may be helpful in articulating some of the problems inherent in the preservation of such materials: sacred waste and anticipatory heritage. 2 With the notion of sacred waste, I aim at spotlighting the ambiguous properties of the material involved and the consequences of such ambiguity for its treatment (Stengs 2011, 2014).3 The notion of anticipatory heritage relates to the ways that societies seek to construct the future memory of their time.4 Drawing on work from the fields of anthropology and the study of religion foregrounding the significance of materiality in the production and preservation of meaning (Van Beek 1996; Miller 2009; Morgan 2010; Bynum 2011; Houtman and Meyer 2012), I take the material itself as my point of departure. How to understand the charging of such materials with meaning and emotional power? What values are involved?

Contested Preservation I start my argument by disentangling the relationships between violent death, collective commemorative rituals and the values invested in the objects involved, using Birgit Meyer’s concept of ‘sensational form’ (2006). With this concept, Meyer seeks to contribute to the study of religion by ­addressing the question of how people sense, and make sense of, experiences that they understand as transcendental. Sensational forms – which carry both meanings of the word sensation: ‘feeling and the inducement of a particular kind of excitement’ – invoke and organize access to the transcendental (2006: 8). Collective rituals as well as material religious objects (books, buildings, images) may be regarded as authorized sensational forms: what they share is a capacity to address religious practitioners and involve them in particular practices of worship to enable them ‘to experience the presence and power of the transcendental’ (2006: 8). To conceptualize transcendental or religious experiences as ‘human encounters with phenomena or events that appear as beyond comprehension’, Meyer uses the notion of a sublime that induces a ‘sense of beauty or terror’ (2006: 9). I understand the (sudden) confrontation with violent death as such an encounter with an event ‘beyond comprehension’. In the violence,

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the sublime manifests itself in its capacity of mere terror, inducing ‘fear of death’ and ‘fear of pain’ (Burke 2001 [1757]). Analogous to the sensational forms evoking, mediating and organizing religious experiences, collective commemorative rituals following upon instances of violent death in the public domain (silent marches, wakes, ­memorials) evoke, mediate and organize grief, anger, sadness and retaliation. Such rituals may be understood as practices to ward off the sublime terror society was so suddenly confronted with; in other words, as present-day forms of incantation. Their material residues, in all their variety, appear in this perspective as physical barriers against such evil and the fears that come with it. The predominance of flowers and candles may be understood as parts of the traditional ritual repertoire related to death, mourning and commemoration, irrespective of any symbolic meaning attributed to the objects.5 The writings, drawings and items referring to the circumstances of the tragedies and the individuals involved form, in their turn, material recountings of the event, narrating the violent fate of the victims. The cuddly toys, references to childhood innocence and morality, are the principal commodities within a Western ‘comfort culture’ that originated in the US in the early 1980s, when adults started to give teddy bears to AIDS patients (Sturken 2007: 8, 131). Since then, the teddybear-cum-cuddly-toy has evolved into the world’s main material carrier of expressions of sympathy and grief, in contexts of tragedy and loss of almost any kind.6 As we will see, each of these categories of materials enforces its own, specific, treatment. My empirical focus is on the Netherlands, where amidst a long list of ‘violent public deaths’, three events stand out because of the nationwide outrage they evoked: the assassination of politician Pim Fortuyn (Hilversum, 6 May 2002); the assassination of movie director and publicist Theo van Gogh (Amsterdam, 2 November 2004), and the killing of seven people, and serious injury of ten others: all members of an audience watching the Queen’s Day Parade (Apeldoorn, 30 April 2009). The latter incident is generally remembered as the ‘Queen’s Day Tragedy’ (Koninginnedagdrama). Irrespective of the differences in (political and individual) motivations and circumstances that underlie the three events, they all evoked a sense of crisis among the Dutch population. On one hand, the societal impact found expression in the ensuing collective commemorations, and in the collection and preservation of many of the materials generated in these rituals. Tracing how Dutch society has dealt with this material enables me to provide empirical substantiation of my understanding of commemorative material as sacred and waste at the same time. Usually only a part of it will be kept, while the other part will be disposed of and consequently acquires the status of waste. But which part to preserve, and which part to dispose of? What arguments or criteria for selection are mobilized?7 On the other hand, the impact of the above events reverberated in the

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heated public debate that evolved in 2010 regarding the question of whether the lethal objects used in the three assaults should be preserved as ‘historical objects of the future’ or – in accordance with standard juridical ­procedure – ­destroyed. Central for my argument here is that the advocates of preservation mobilized ‘history’ by framing the (future) historical value of these sensational objects as similar to the present-day historical value attached to certain controversial objects preserved from the seventeenth century Dutch Republic, the so-called ‘relics of Dutch national history’ (vaderlandse relieken). ‘Relics of Dutch national history’ form a specific subcategory of ‘secular relics’: objects that are considered to have belonged to or have been in touch with persons, or have originated in events that are ­retrospectively – or, in the cases in this study, anticipatorily – regarded as ‘historical’. Such objects are stored or displayed in secular places as museums or research institutions (see Bodenstein 2011). It is my objective to bring out why materiality is essential for the persuasive power of such secular relics in evoking the past. Thus my interest is not the question of whether specific historical objects have the potential to transfer factual knowledge of the past, a general assumption criticized by Ludmilla Jordanova (1989). Instead, it lies in exploring the potential of objects to induce in people a sense of past events and experiences by transferring narratives and emotions (see also Van de Port and Meyer, this volume). For it is that potential that demands that contemporary lethal objects be preserved in order to exercise their power, in the future, to evoke the then past.

Safeguarding Tragedy On 30 April 2009 at 11.50 am, in the Dutch provincial town of Apeldoorn, a black Suzuki Swift sped straight through an audience watching the annual Queen’s Day Parade. Aiming for the Queen and the royal family, the driver killed seven people in the audience instead. The car crashed against the Queen Wilhelmina Monument (de Naald, ‘the Needle’) in the centre of the crossing where the royal family was scheduled to pass in an open bus, and left the driver fatally wounded. The tragedy took place before the eyes of millions of people watching the Parade by live television broadcast. In the following days, a continuous stream of commemorative objects flooded the crossing and its vicinity, the memorial space of the National Canadian Liberation Memorial in particular.8 The abundance of fresh flowers (for instance, lilac, jasmine, tulips, roses, lilies of the valley, quite a few apparently handpicked from private gardens), gave the memorial an extraordinary aesthetic in terms of colour and fragrance, outshining the presence of such objects as letters, ribbons, candles and cuddly toys. In the week after the tragedy, the director of Restauratie Atelier Sterken BV, a workshop specializing in the restoration and conservation of paper, leather and vellum,9 contacted the Apeldoorn city authorities to offer free

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assistance with the preservation of the commemorative material, an offer that was gratefully accepted.10 Two days after the formal commemoration ceremony (8 May), Atelier Sterken gathered all materials, except for the flowers, plants and candles. After a treatment of three months, entailing freezing, drying, cleaning, flattening and gamma radiation (for disinfection), the conservation process was completed. The city authorities had decided that the materials would become part of the collection of CODA (Cultuur Onder Dak Apeldoorn), Apeldoorn’s main cultural centre, consisting of a museum, library and archive. Atelier Sterken had provided similar assistance before; after the so-called ‘Enschede Firework Disaster’ (23 May 2000), when an exploding firework warehouse destroyed an entire neighbourhood, leaving 23 people dead, and approximately 950 wounded; and in 2004, when film director Theo van Gogh was killed by an Islamist fanatic. Atelier Sterken’s dedication started when the Enschede City Archives approached Jan Sterken (the workshop’s founder) to preserve some of the artefacts collected by the Archives in the neighbourhood where the firework warehouse had exploded. Sterken and his employees decided to offer their assistance pro bono. In 2010, some of the preserved materials were used in an exhibition commemorating the tenth anniversary of the disaster. With regard to what may be described as the ‘Theo van Gogh materials’, Atelier Sterken preserved the commemorative material selected from the memorial sites – in consultation with Van Gogh’s relatives – by the Rijksmuseum (the ‘National Museum’) and the Amsterdam Museum,11 as well as the threatening letter that the assassin had pinned with a knife to the body of Van Gogh (Figure 9.1).12 This letter went to the Public Prosecutor, where it is still kept. Most of the paper commemorative material, predominantly drawings and letters, became part of the collection of the Amsterdam City Archives. There it was categorized13 and digitalized, and still forms a permanent virtual exhibition displayed on the Archives’ website.14 In addition, the Amsterdam Museum15 and the Rijksmuseum have several objects and letters in their collections (but not in their permanent exhibitions), which are partly accessible on the museums’ websites. A telling example of such an object in the Rijksmuseum collection is a film container, with a cigarette butt attached to it – Van Gogh was an ostentatious smoker – labelled ‘Film Fortuin’ (not Fortuyn!) and the text ‘This was your last film, on Pim Fortuin. This time, you were the victim’, written on it (Figures 9.2 and 9.3).16 The collection and preservation of the Pim Fortuyn commemorative material followed different trajectories. From the commemorations celebrating the tenth anniversary of Fortuyn’s death (in 2012), it became apparent that a selection of the material had been kept by the foundation Stichting Vrienden van Pim Fortuyn (Friends of Pim Fortuyn), a foundation established in the memory of Fortuyn. For the occasion, the foundation created a ‘commemoration memorial’ next to the statue of Fortuyn in

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Figure 9.1  Workers of the Amsterdam Sanitation Department selecting items to be preserved as part of the clearing of the Theo van Gogh memorial site, one week after the murder (10 November 2004). Photo by the author.

Rotterdam, composed largely of original 2002 commemorative objects, such as flags, cuddly toys, posters, candles and T-shirts with slogans (Figure 9.4). Most of the Fortuyn commemorative material, however, is kept at the Meertens Institute, where I work. This institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences is dedicated to the research and documentation of ‘diversity in language and culture in the Netherlands’.17 Initially, Fortuyn’s brothers and sister were not eager to hand over the material to any of the interested parties.18 When, in the year after the murder, societal interest in ‘Fortuyn’ quickly faded, the disappointed family decided to bury the materials with Fortuyn in the monumental grave at his summer residence in Italy. Meertens Institute researcher Peter Jan Margry managed to convince the family that preservation at the Meertens Institute would be a more appropriate destination with the arguments that

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Figure 9.2  Object NG-2004-72-2. Image courtesy of the Rijksmuseum.

firstly: ‘They were ethnographic source material par excellence … As commentaries they could be turned into important material cultural heritage for the social and political history of the Netherlands’ (Margry 2011: 333); and secondly, the collection would be catalogued and made accessible ‘to both scholars and the general public’ (Margry 2011: 333). ‘[T]he enthusiasm … for a public function for this cultural heritage collection’ made the family realize it would enable them to create a ‘substantive memorial to their late brother’ (Margry 2011: 333). Moreover, the interest of a national institute in the collection served as an ‘implicit confirmation of the lasting importance of the movement and of Fortuyn’s legacy’ (Margry 2011: 334). After describing how the Fortuyn family gave their consent, Margry elaborates on the ‘methodological problems’ of preservation he encountered. Should ‘realia’: ‘neckties, cigars, small dogs’, be included? The decision was made to preserve the collection ‘as it was collected, namely, without any cleaning or polishing’ (Margry 2011: 335). The importance of the latter is stressed once more: The Fortuyn materials have not been cleaned and polished, unlike the Theo van Gogh collection, from which such characteristic elements as protective sleeves were also removed … Nor is the material rigidly (and wrongly) thematically categorized; the Fortuyn materials are to a certain extent preserved as found at the various memorials and the pseudo-grave. (Margry 2011: 340 n. 3)

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Figure 9.3  The film container in a truck on its way to preservation (10 November 2004). Photo by the author.

The quotes seem to emphasize a degree of authenticity, which, they imply, is missing in the other collections. As is the case with almost all such commemorative collections, the Fortuyn collection at the Meertens Institute is a selection from the material that was available. For instance, a container with cuddly toys, originally regarded by the family ‘as an ideal gift for third-world children’ (Margry 2011: 332), was not preserved, for two reasons. First, according to Margry, these ‘unmarked stuffed animals … would not produce enough additional relevant information for research’, and second, ‘the costs for disinfection, preservation, and storage would have exceeded the budget’ (Margry 2011: 335). It is worth taking a closer look at the dealings with cuddly toys, as these help to flesh out some of the complexities inherent in dealing with commemorative material in general. After Fortuyn’s funeral, the memorial sites were cleared and the materials (except for the flowers, I presume) went to the family. These amounted

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Figure 9.4  The 2012 Pim Fortuyn ‘Commemoration Memorial’ consisting of original 2002 commemorative objects. Photo by the author.

to large quantities, as the container with cuddly toys exemplifies. The family’s intention to donate the cuddly toys to ‘third-world children’ highlights the difficulty of disposing of such material as just garbage. Charged with an emotional or moral value, the material demands special treatment. Such a situation becomes the more relevant when large quantities are involved. For instance, the quantities of memorial material that ‘inundated’ the streets of New York, the Pentagon and the Flight 93 crash site in Pennsylvania confronted collectors of these ‘ephemera of loss’, in this case the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in particular, with the question of how much of the material could be collected (Gardner 2011: 289–90). For the remaining material, however, no proper destination existed. A charity destination may offer a way out to the moral dilemma imposed on the caretakers. The eventual dealings with the flowers left after the death of Princess Diana are illustrative here: the fresh flowers were selected to be sent to homes for the elderly, while the remaining 10,000 to 15,000 tons of flower material was composted for use in royal parks (Greenhalgh 1999: 42, 48). The flowers collected at the Columbine High School memorial were treated in a similar vein: ‘Rotten flowers became compost for the Denver area park; fresh flowers became potpourri for victims’ families’ (Doss 2010: 72). In the Netherlands, the Dutch Ministry of Internal Affairs was confronted with a similar dilemma in the aftermath of the

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MH17 Malaysia Airlines plane crash.19 This atrocity left all 298 people on board, including 193 Dutch citizens, dead in the Ukraine on 17 July 2014. In January 2015, the Ministry commissioned the mayor of Hilversum, the town where most of the commemorations had been taking place and where also MH17 commemorative material from other locations had been stored, to develop a ‘National Cuddly Toy Protocol’ (nationaal knuffelprotocol) for dealing with such cuddly toys, both in the present case and in future. Although no official protocol has been established to date, the dealings with the MH17 cuddly toys, which numbered almost a thousand, might serve as an example for future cases. For the 2015 MH17 commemoration, the cuddly toys were used for a wall (knuffelmuur), a construction that may be captured best as a ‘wall of compassion’ (Figure 9.5). Thereafter, the foundation Vliegramp MH17 (Plane Crash MH17) cleaned the toys, and approached a charity, the foundation Geef een Knuffel (Give a Cuddle). The latter foundation collects money for children with cystic fibrosis, and distributes cuddly toys among sick children in hospitals and related destinations, such as Ronald McDonald houses. The foundation ascertains that the children will never hear or find out about the origins of their new cuddly toy. In this way, the objects, cleared from their emotional value, could start a ‘new life’. Returning to the Fortuyn cuddly toys, the family never managed to donate these to third-world children, because of the ‘spiraling costs of cleaning’ (Margry 2011: 332). Herewith, another ‘trash’ dimension of

Figure 9.5  The ‘Wall of Compassion’ (2015) constructed from the cuddly toys left at various sites in commemoration of the MH17 victims in 2014. ANP, photo: Michael Kooren, Pool. Printed with permission.

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commemorative material is highlighted: when not taken care of properly, it will soon disintegrate or decay to assume a gestalt that in other cases would imply removal as waste. Affected by humidity and dirt, the cuddly toys had, in some sense, become waste: unless thoroughly cleaned, they were no longer suitable for donation. Yet, in their status of ‘sacred’ objects, the toys resisted disposal. Together with all the other Fortuyn materials for which the family could not find a proper destination, the toys awaited a special – ritual – treatment: collective burial in Fortuyn’s grave in Italy. This ritual disposal never happened either, however: when the other Fortuyn materials had gained a new status as ‘national cultural heritage’, the toys’ waste value overruled their sacredness. The family only could take the final step towards desacralization by disposal; however, only after this had been made ethically acceptable by the declaration that the cuddly toys were scientifically redundant. The ‘life history’ (see Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986) of these cuddly toys provides an empirical illustration of the consequences that may follow from the tug of war between the waste and sacred values of such materials. Being inherently unstable, sacred waste tends to move – to paraphrase Appadurai (1986: 13) – ‘in and out’ of its state as either sacred or trash, according to time and circumstances.

Future Relics of Dutch National History The second part of this contribution focuses on the arguments mobilized for or against preservation or destruction of the lethal objects used in the assaults. Opposed, in the debates on this matter, are the objects’ attributed historical value – again, a scientific argument – and their negative, emotional value, which I discuss below. As it is my intention to shed light on the growing urge to preserve, I first ask the question: what elements constitute the scientific argument? From there, I will proceed to the forces requesting destruction in order to better understand, in the words of Dutch anthropologist Gosewijn van Beek (1996: 15), why certain issues ‘must be settled “materially”’. The objects concerned are: the wreck of the car that was driven at the Queen and the royal family during the 2009 Queen’s Day celebrations; the pistol that killed Pim Fortuyn; and the knife that the assassin left in the chest of Theo van Gogh. The case of Theo van Gogh involves other controversial materials as well: a pistol, a machete, another knife and the threatening letter already mentioned. Yet, more than any other object, the knife in the chest has become the iconic image of that murder. The destination of the three objects became an issue after a short news item by RTL4, one of the Dutch commercial channels, stating that the CODA Museum was planning to organize an exhibition including the wrecked car. 20 Both the director of the CODA Museum (Carin Reijnders) and the director of the Dutch Police Museum in Apeldoorn (Taco Pauka) where the wreck was stored denied that they were planning an exhibition, but were firm on the historical relevance of the object. To them ‘the

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wrecked car was an important object in telling history’. 21 To explain their desire to preserve the object, the directors compared the wreck with other controversial objects kept in museums. Pauka, in an interview with the national public broadcaster NOS: ‘Some years ago, we obtained the knives used in the killing of Theo van Gogh’. 22 To further demonstrate the  museum’s integrity in dealing with such sensitive material he added that the preservation of these weapons does not entail exhibition in the near future at all: ‘At present, placing it in a showcase and showing it to all people is something I even wouldn’t dream of. We keep this in silence, and in peace and quiet, until a generation will arise that is able to decide on the thing with some more distance than we, who are emotionally involved with the object’. 23 With this comparison, Pauka firstly places the wreck in the same category of objects as the Theo van Gogh murder weapons, herewith including these objects in the debate. Secondly, he emphasizes that emotional distance is a precondition for any decision taken on a possible status of such objects as true museum objects. And thirdly, his argument demonstrates a responsibility as a professional collector by expressing his commitment to future generations’ awareness of history. Reijnders’ comparison similarly revolved around the significance of emotional distancing. Yet, she chose to compare the wreck with a controversial object four centuries older, exhibited in the Rijksmuseum: the sword that had been used in the beheading of Dutch statesman and supreme government attorney Johan van Oldenbarnevelt in 1619. Reijnders: ‘Now, it is far too heavily charged, far too delicate. And this delicacy rules our perception. At present, in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, one may see the sword with which Van Oldenbarnevelt was beheaded. Well, today, we look at it with a pretty objective gaze, as a piece from our national history’.24 With this statement, Reijnders placed the wreck in a very specific category of controversial objects, generally referred to as ‘relics of Dutch national history’ (vaderlandse relieken). From Reijnder’s perspective, the wreck appears as a future relic of Dutch national history. Coincidentally or not, the pistol that had been used to kill Pim Fortuyn hit the headlines one week later. In its function of ‘Museum of Dutch National History’, the Rijksmuseum was in the process of obtaining the object. Moreover, Wim Pijbes, the director of the Rijksmuseum, explicitly envisaged the pistol as a future relic of Dutch national history. Again, a comparison was made with the Johan van Oldenbarnevelt sword. In the public discussion that followed, the (destroyed) pistol used in the killing of the ‘founding father of the nation’, Prince William of Orange (1584) was also mentioned. Furthermore, the Rijksmuseum emphasized the importance of the preservation of the pistol for future generations, acknowledging the contemporary emotions still clinging to it. Thus, within one week, lethal objects from the three national tragedies appeared in a debate focusing on the question of their importance for the history of the future. The pro-preservation stance, most strongly voiced by historians and

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professionals working in the world of museums and heritage, was based on a scientific argument: the objects have become part of the nation’s history, and are therefore to be considered future relics of Dutch national history.

Historical Sensations To better appreciate the persuasive power of the argument that an object may be a ‘relic of Dutch national history’ it is necessary to explore this category of objects in more detail. Why do these objects have the potency to inspire the preservation of present-day objects as potential future relics? The notion of ‘relics of Dutch national history’ conveys that in the Netherlands a specific category of historical objects is perceived as ‘relics’, a categorization that sets these objects apart from any other object related to Dutch national history. What objects does this category entail? Relics are usually body parts or pieces (including hair or nails) of sacred men and women, or items that have belonged to them; objects thus of individuals with a special relation to God or with the divine and therefore religiously charged. The nineteenth century anthropologist James Frazer understood this charging as the working of ‘contagious magic’: objects touched by the saint are objects touched by the divine. In the Western European context, relics are generally understood as Catholic objects, in particular. Yet, the Dutch vaderlandse relieken are definitely not Catholic but rather are ‘secular’. The concept of the vaderlandse reliek specifically relates to objects from seventeenth-century Holland, a period generally known as ‘the Dutch Republic’ (1588–1794, formally the Republic of the United Netherlands). The earlier sixteenth century Calvinist-protestant iconoclasm had been directed against the veneration of saints and, by implication, against that of relics. Paradoxically, it has been the formally Reformist Republic that produced the most significant relics of Dutch national history or ‘secular relics’ as they are conceived of today. One issue that dominated politics in the seventeenth century Republic was the struggle for political control between Republicans and Orangeists. The latter, largely the old nobility, were the protagonists of a cardinal political role for the Orange family. Although Holland was a Republic, the locus of power – the so-called ‘Stadtholder’ (Stadhouder, the chief magistrate of the United Provinces of the Netherlands) – was an hereditary position, occupied by a family of princely descent, the House of OrangeNassau. 25 In their ambition to establish a truly republican administration, the Republicans, based in wealthy merchant circles, particularly in Amsterdam, opposed the dynastical rule of the Stadtholders. It goes beyond the topic of this contribution to outline the political turmoil and alternating power constellations of the seventeenth century in detail. Yet, to understand why objects related to some of the main political players of the period could survive as relics, it is important to understand that the political antagonism between Republicans and Orangeists continued to dominate political

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debate until Napoleonic times. Following the ‘social life’ (Appadurai 1986) of particular objects related to statesmen, vicars and scholars who had resisted the primacy of the Stadtholders, historian Wim Vroom shows how these objects played a role in this ongoing dispute (1997: 12–14). 26 They appeared as objects of veneration in Republican-inspired drawings, poems, stories and songs, while simultaneously being the target of derision and ridicule in lampoons and pamphlets from the Orangeist side. Most valued in this ‘secular relic cult’ were objects related to the heroes of the so-called Loevestein party (named after Loevestein Castle, the state prison): Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, Hugo de Groot (internationally known as Grotius) and the brothers Jan and Cornelis de Witt, in particular. Except for Hugo de Groot, all died violent deaths. For the purpose of this contribution – understanding why present-day lethal objects may appear as future relics – I will briefly present the events and circumstances that generated today’s most important ‘relics of Dutch national history’, including the relics related to the death of William of Orange, as these relics were specifically mentioned in the 2010 debate. As we will see, issues concerning the objects’ perceived authenticity continue to play a role in present-day controversies.

Events and Circumstances I In 1584, protestant Stadtholder Prince William of Orange was murdered in the Prince’s Court in Delft by a fervent Catholic in Spanish service, named Balthasar Gerards. The perpetrator was sentenced for high treason, and executed in public. First, as the law required, the traitor’s weapon was publicly destroyed on the scaffold. The bullet holes left by William’s murderer in an inner wall of the Court, now a museum, have reputedly been treasured ever since. A forensic reconstruction of the murder, conducted in 2012, authenticated the bullet holes as original. That year, the Prince’s Court obtained an authentic sixteenth-century radslotpistool for its new exhibition ‘Cold Case: Willem van Oranje’.

Events and Circumstances II After a severe confrontation with Stadtholder Prince Maurits (a son of William of Orange), Johan van Oldenbarnevelt was accused of high treason and beheaded on 13 May 1619. The execution generated many relics, of which only a few have been preserved. After the execution, ‘supporters’ kept pieces of Van Oldenbarnevelt’s velvet mantle soaked with blood. A witness described how, after the beheading, bystanders soaked their handkerchiefs in the blood; some scraped blood-soaked sand and pieces of wood from the scaffold in order to sell the pieces to other bystanders. Some buyers, on the contrary, wanted the blood of Van Oldenbarnevelt out of revenge: ‘mixed with wine, they drank the blood’ (Vroom 1997: 14–15, trans. I.S.). The objects that survived as relics of Dutch national history are a seventeenth

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century execution sword and the walking stick (het stockske) with which the aged Oldenbarnevelt had reputedly climbed the scaffold. In fact, there are three stockskes, all claimed to be the authentic one. With regard to the unclear provenance of the sword, Vroom makes the comparison with the rediscovery of a medieval miraculous statue: ‘wrongfully neglected, it is discovered by accident, and then begins its triumphal march’ (1997: 33, trans. I.S.). From the moment of its ‘reappearing’ (around 1743), the object has been successfully promoted as the sword used in Van Oldenbarnevelt’s execution. The sword and one of the sticks are permanently exhibited in the Rijksmuseum.

Events and Circumstances III Another event that still appeals to the national imagination is the escape from Loevestein Castle by Hugo de Groot, a well-known lawyer and an ally of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt. Hugo de Groot was also arrested on charges of high treason. In 1619, De Groot was sentenced to lifelong imprisonment in Loevestein Castle. In 1621, he managed to escape in a book chest. The chest has become one of the relics of Dutch national history. Other important De Groot relics are the modest bricklayers’ jacket that De Groot had reputedly worn in order to cross the Dutch border unrecognized on his way to Antwerp, and his Loevestein wine glass. Like the walking stick, there are several chests, some of them rediscovered one to two centuries after the escape. This is proof, Vroom concludes, of the meaning that people attached to these objects and that, in that sense, all of them can be regarded as true ‘relics’ (1997: 38). The Rijksmuseum exhibits one of the book chests, along with the story of De Groot’s escape, concluding the text with the line: ‘the chest on display here was long thought to be the one from this famous story’.

Events and Circumstances IV The lynching of the brothers Jan and Cornelis de Witt on 20 August 1672 is considered one of the most gruesome political killings in Dutch history. Both Jan and Cornelis had been important statesmen, but because of a combination of circumstances their fate turned, and both were arrested for high treason in 1672. On 20 August of that year, the brothers were publicly lynched and literally torn to pieces in The Hague. The relics generated by the murder were of a particular kind, namely pieces of their bodies: ears, nose, hair, skin, blood, genitals, tongues and toes. An eyewitness – a supporter of the brothers – describes with abhorrence how he saw the mob ‘cutting the brothers fingers from the hands, the noses from the faces, the lips from the mouths, the ears from the heads, the tongues out the mouths, and the toes from the feet, to sell these to interested bystanders’ (Vroom 1997: 15, trans. I.S.). Again, these ‘objects’

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were desired by enemies as trophies as well as by supporters as relics. The eyewitness himself bought a piece of the index finger of Jan de Witt, and wrote a widely distributed poem in which he praised this particular body part for having been raised in an oath against the Stadtholder (Vroom 1997: 15–17). Today, the tongue of Jan de Witt and a toe of Cornelis de Witt are on display in the The Hague Historical Museum. The objects now known as vaderlandse relieken were charged with the political sentiments and emotions of their time, which explains why they survived to become relics. Now, four hundred years later, these emotions are gone with the people who felt them. In the larger narrative of the origin of the Dutch nation state they have become material evidences of the truth of that history – irrespective of how differently this history has been told over the course of time. Important in obtaining the status of relic is their ‘history of preservation’. As Vroom has shown, many of the objects have been family heirlooms of relatives. Most objects disappeared from the public view and interest; only a few eventually surfaced in curiosity cabinets or, in the mid nineteenth century, in exhibitions of national antiquities, to be incorporated eventually into the collections of the emerging national museums. There, according to Vroom, the objects are not always properly valued: a preoccupation with scientifically established authenticity – with the question whether these objects really are what the narrations claim them to be (see Van de Port and Meyer’s introduction) – obscures questions about their historical meaning. More than written documents, he argues, the objects bring the past literally within reach (1997: 38). Vroom’s plea for taking the meaning of these objects seriously locates the sense of authenticity that people may experience from interaction with them in the realm of the sensorial (cf. Van de Port and Meyer), to which we may add, with Jordanova (1989), the realm of the imagination. For a better understanding of the capacity of such objects to induce people to engage in sensorial, emotional, imaginative and intellectual relations with the past, the final section of this contribution addresses the material presence of the objects: their sheer materiality as fundamental for their aesthetic appeal and persuasiveness.

Emotional Distancing and the Past of the Future Vroom’s argument has been made for the wreck, the knife and the pistol as well as for the commemorative objects brought to the places of mischief: all these may eventually bring the past of the future within reach. Declaring such objects relics of Dutch national history in the making constitutes an attempt to write these murders into history. In that sense, the museums and institutions mentioned are involved in the creation of the heritage of the future or, as I call it, anticipatory heritage.27 In contrast to ‘heritage looking back’, when the historical value of certain objects is decided

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upon retrospectively, museums and institutions may now also collect in anticipation of the possible historical value of certain objects or materials for the future. When it comes to the preservation of materials pertaining to violent death in the public domain, the significance of emotional distancing (see also Blanes, this volume) may work either way, as I will show in the remainder of this contribution. Like the Republican relics in their time, the wreck, the knife and the pistol are objects charged with emotion: they differ from objects from the past in that their past is still within reach. It is precisely the absence of distance in time and affective involvement that gave rise to the controversy at stake. The RTL4 news on the preservation of the wreck evoked negative responses, based on emotional and normative arguments. The aversion evoked by the idea of preservation/display was most strongly voiced by the bereaved, but also resonated with views on the topic among ‘the general public’ as evidenced in public letters, web forums, etc. Relatives of Queen’s Day Tragedy victims who had learned about the preservation plans through the media used expressions such as ‘macabre’ or ‘ultimate insanity’. The mayor of Apeldoorn immediately expressed strong disapproval of the idea of future exhibition, as did the parents of the perpetrator/driver of the car. The CODA Museum and the Dutch Police Museum tried in vain to contextualize their work. Reijnders: It is really unfortunate that this is announced as if we were preparing an exhibition with that murder weapon. Now, this car receives lots of attention, but at the same time many cuddly toys, poems and letters that were left at that spot are being preserved as well, to allow that story to be told as well and as broadly as possible to future generations. 28

The parents of the perpetrator appealed to the court to ask for the wreck’s destruction and won the case. They justified their request with the argument that it was emotionally unbearable for them to live with the idea that the object with which their son had killed seven people would be on display somewhere, sometime. The news on the Rijksmuseum collection plans for ‘the Pim Fortuyn pistol’ was accompanied by the message that the pistol would only become part of the collection if the Fortuyn family would give their consent. The latter came almost instantly. Marten Fortuyn, Pim Fortuyn’s brother: ‘This confirms that my brother has written history; or, at least, that his murderer has. If I were the museum, however, I would take out its spring’.29 As with all crime-related objects, the pistol had so far been preserved as evidence by the Public Prosecution Service. According to protocol, the Service will destroy such objects when the evidence is no longer needed. In case an institution is interested in obtaining such an object (always as a loan) a request with justification may be sent to the public prosecutor, who will decide on the object’s future. For the pistol, the Theo van Gogh weapons and the wreck, such requests have, indeed, been made. The public prosecutor approved the

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Rijksmuseum’s request for the pistol, the Dutch Police Museum’s request for the Theo van Gogh weapons, and was probably also intending to approve a request for the wreck, which came both from the CODA Museum and the Dutch Police Museum. According to the curator of the Dutch Police Museum, a wooden case had already been prepared to store the wreck. It was the intention to give the wreck a place far away in the museum’s basement and out of sight of anybody, even of the employees of the museum itself. The latter is not to be understood as a mere description of how the wreck would have been treated. As an embodiment of pain and death, the wreck needed to be hidden from sight in the most remote corner of the museum basement. Yet, for others, such concealment would be not enough. Like the sixteenth century execution of Balthazar Gerards’ pistol – its ritual destruction on the scaffold – it was felt that the wreck should be destroyed. Following Van Beek (1996: 15–16), I understand the destruction of the wreck not as merely symbolic but as the consequence of its material capacity to engage people with its violent past. The wreck’s materiality, one might say, thus works both in its favour and against it: as the concrete embodiment of the narrative of the violence of which it has been part, it renders this past sensible, (re)evoking emotions of anger and grief associated with the attack. This capacity is the primary reason why various parties insisted on preserving the wreck. Yet, as a material object, it may be destroyed (see Van Beek 1996: 15). Consequently, the wreck’s capacity to ‘bring the past within reach’ enabled other parties to mobilize this destructability. The destinations of the other potential relics to date demonstrate that the outcome of the antithetical forces associated with the objects’ materiality remains uncertain. The ‘Fortuyn pistol’ became part of the Rijksmuseum collection. Although not on display, it is kept in storage. The ‘Theo van Gogh weapons’ (most probably) still are in the depot of the Dutch Police Museum. However, since the general negative response to the museum’s interest in preserving the wreck still resonates, the museum denies any ‘involvement’ with the objects.30 The necessity of such denial demonstrates the contentious and dangerous potency inherent in anything ‘sacre’ (see Chidester 2014: 239–40). The assaults charged the lethal objects with a negative moral and emotional value, whereas the commemorative rituals charged the commemorative materials with a positive moral and emotional value. It is helpful to bring these apparently antagonistic categories of objects or materials within the same analytical framework of heritage formation and processes of sacralization (Meyer and De Witte 2013). Whether positively or negatively charged, the values attached to these objects/materials account for their special, set apart – and hence sacred – status, and their consequent framing as (future) heritage. The potential effects of such framing may be powerful as, in the words of Meyer and De Witte, ‘even ordinary objects may be elevated to the level of the extraordinary and achieve a new sublime or sacred quality’ (2013: 276). In the case of the sensationally charged objects and materials under study here, this framing proved to have powerful effects indeed: framing

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as heritage brought to the fore tensions and contestations over control and ownership, and highlighted the antithetical forces inherent in the materiality of the objects/materials. Important features of anything sacred are ambivalence and a tendency to escape control (Chidester 2014: 240). The ambiguity explains the two directions framing as heritage may take. For the objects/ materials charged with positive emotions such as empathy and grief, disposal and destruction would appear as a denial of what people are standing for (or against). Precisely because distancing is yet impossible, the objects/ materials need to be preserved. Yet, their mere quantity and/or ephemerality oppose such control. As the car wreck, the Fortuyn pistol and the Theo van Gogh weapons are all charged with negative emotions, the historical and other scientific arguments for preservation may be interpreted as attempts to untie the objects from the emotions involved. Framing the objects as possible future relics of national history implied the creation of distance, which was unbearable for many involved. At the same time, however, the curators and other institutional collectors involved assumed that these are exactly the kind of objects that in due time will generate those emotions that will connect people with the nation’s myths and narratives. There is something paradoxical in the way the creators of future heritage deliberately seek distancing while intending a future use of this possibly most sensational form of heritage. As I have argued, relics of national history, as a specific kind of heritage, work precisely because these objects are sensational: they facilitate experiences of the past through the senses. Irene Stengs is Professor by Special Appointment in ‘Anthropology of Ritual and Popular Culture’ at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, and Senior Researcher at the Meertens Instituut (Amsterdam). In her research, in Thailand and in the Netherlands, she focuses on popular religiosity, material culture, commemorative ritual and processes of heritage formation. Among her publications are Worshipping the Great Modernizer: King Chulalongkorn, Patron Saint of the Thai Middle Class, (NUS Press, 2009) and Het fenomeen Hazes: een venster op Nederland, (Amsterdam University Press, 2015).

Notes I want to thank my colleagues from the Heritage Dynamics research project for providing such an original, stimulating and critical environment. Without them, I would not have been able to develop my work on heritage formation and commemorative culture along the lines of this contribution. My special thanks go to Jeroen Beets, Ferdinand de Jong, Birgit Meyer and Mattijs van de Port for their critical reading and comments on earlier versions of this chapter.   1. More recent examples include materials collected at the memorial sites related to terrorist attacks in Nice, Paris, Brussels and Manchester.

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  2. Phyllis Passariello (1994) uses the notion of sacred waste in an article on the ritual (re)use of the human body and its parts, remains and excrements, the placenta in particular. Hence, Passariello basically deals with the sacrality and the sacralization of human waste departing from the question ‘is anything that once was part of a human ever considered pure waste by humans’ (1994: 110). I view sacred waste as a much broader and more encompassing concept (Stengs 2014).   3. Commemorative material is but one instance of ‘accidentally produced’ (Chidester 2014) objects or substances ‘that cannot be disposed of as just garbage (or rubble), but neither can be kept or left alone’ (Stengs 2014: 235).   4. In Ruy Blanes’ contribution on scaffolding in Luanda (this volume), constructing future memory happens literally.   5. See Hallam and Hockey (2001) on floral symbolism and death.   6. See Linenthal (2001) and Sturken (2007) on the ubiquity of teddy bears in US commemorative culture since the Oklahoma Bombing (19 April 1995). Sturken makes a convincing argument for the ‘Americanness’ of the phenomenon, but contrary to her assertion that it ‘is impossible to imagine, by comparison, a group of European officials standing at a memorial while holding teddy bears’ (2007: 131), I think, judging from the omnipresence of cuddly toys in European commemorative culture, that such imaginings are now very possible.   7. These dilemmas are widely recognized: see for instance the The New York Times ‘What to do with the Tributes after the Shooting Stops’ (https://www.nytimes. com/2017/07/07/us/dallas-police-shooting-tributes.html, accessed 30 August 2017).   8. Although, of course, the Needle is central here, the city authorities almost immediately decided to channel all tributes to the vicinity of the Liberation Memorial. This memorial, ‘The Man with Two Heads’, commemorates the importance and role of Canadian armed forces in the liberation of the Netherlands in 1945. An identical memorial commemorates the liberation in Ottawa. The Needle was erected in 1901 on the occasion of Queen Wilhelmina’s marriage, and also as a tribute to the queen’s parents (King William III and Queen Emma).   9. Atelier Sterken’s two sister companies, Documenten Wacht (Documents Watch) and Museum Wacht (Museum Watch), are specialized in the protection, maintenance, transportation and restoration of collections and archives of museums, banks, government institutions and libraries. Both companies partly work through an insurance-like membership system. 10. Interview with the director of Atelier Sterken (Jeroen Jochem) on 23 August 2012. 11. At the time, the Amsterdam History Museum. 12. The letter was addressed to a Somali-born Dutch politician (Ayaan Hirsi Ali), a ­former Muslim and outspoken critic of Islam, who had worked with Van Gogh on a  short movie (Submission, 2004) about the suppression and abuse of women by Islam. In the letter, the assassin calls for a holy war, also threatening various other ‘heretics’. 13. See  https://archief.amsterdam/inventarissen/inventaris/30051.nl.html   (accessed 30 August 2017). 14. See https://archief.amsterdam/stukken/dood/theo_van_gogh/ (accessed 30 August 2017). 15. See http://am.adlibhosting.com/Details/collect/54637 (accessed 30 August 2017). 16. The film container is catalogued as object NG-2004-72-2, see www.rijksmuseum.nl (accessed 30 August 2017). Judging from the dates of acquisition, the Rijksmuseum started to collect commemorative objects only after the murder of Theo van Gogh. Next to several Theo van Gogh commemorative objects (the film case, several written statements), the museum placed a ‘Pim Fortuyn flag’ on its website in December 2004. Other objects are all of a later date.

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17. See http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/cms/en/component/content/article/160-uncategor ised/138759-collectie-pim-fortuyn (accessed 30 August 2017). 18. The National Archives and the International Institute of Social History (IISG) were also interested. 19. The plane was hit by a Buk rocket, allegedly fired by Ukrainian separatists, most probably with Russian support. 20. http://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/binnenland/auto-karst-t-wordt-tentoongesteld (accessed 30 August 2017). 21. http://nos.nl/artikel/185406-burgemeester-auto-karst-tates-niet-tentoonstellen.html (accessed 30 August 2017). 22. http://nos.nl/audio/185428-suzuki-swift-bewaren-voor-volgende-generaties.html (accessed 12 November 2014, no longer available. Trans. I.S.). 23. http://nos.nl/audio/185428-suzuki-swift-bewaren-voor-volgende-generaties.html (accessed 12 November 14, no longer available. Trans. I.S.). 24. NOS Journaal, 16 September 2010, http://nos.nl/artikel/185406-burgemeester-autokarst-t-niet-tentoonstellen.html (accessed 30 August 2017. Trans. I.S.). 25. The title is derived from the idea that the person involved ‘holds’ the vacant seat (stad = place) of the king. The Netherlands had abjured Spanish king Philip II, but not the monarchy as such. 26. Other groups of secular relics distinguished by Vroom are objects related to the first period of the rebellion against the Spanish troops, objects related to the House of Oranje-Nasssau, and objects related to the military, mostly the maritime heroes, Piet Heijn, Michiel de Ruyter and father and son Tromp (Vroom 1997: 12). 27. My inspiration for this notion is derived from Dutch art historian Frans Grijzenhout, who calls a project of Dutch ethnologists to preserve 52,000 ‘letters to the future’ by ordinary Dutch people ‘a tendency towards anticipating “heritagization” of the present’ (Grijzenhout 2007: 16–17). But, as Derrida and Prenowitz (1995) state, any archive refers to the future and not to the past. 28. http://nos.nl/artikel/185406-burgemeester-auto-karst-tates-niet-tentoonstellen.html (accessed 30 September 2017. Trans. I.S.). 29. http://nos.nl/artikel/187077-rijksmuseum-wil-vuurwapen-volkert-van-der-g.html (accessed 30 September 2017. Trans. I.S.). 30. When trying to trace the whereabouts of the weapons, I met a profound silence regarding the question of whether these objects (particularly the most iconic among them – the knife that was found in the chest of Van Gogh) were actually in the collection of the Dutch Police Museum. In January 2014, insiders told me that since the debacle with the car wreck the museum had been unable to add any new object to its collection; previously, objects had come as donations from the public or the public prosecutor. Furthermore, the museum is very concerned about any possible negative news.

References Appadurai, A. 1986. ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3–63. Bodenstein, F. 2011. ‘The Emotional Museum: Thoughts on the “Secular Relics” of Nineteenth-Century History Museums in Paris and their Posterity’, Conserveries mémorielles: Revue Transdiscipliniere de Jeune Chercheurs 9(3). Retrieved 21 June 2016 from http://cm.revues.org/ 834.

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Burke, E. 2001 [1757]. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and the Beautiful. New York: Bartleby. Retrieved 21 June 2016 from http://www.bartleby.com/24/2/202.html. Bynum, C.W. 2011. Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. New York: Zone Books. Chidester, D. 2014. ‘In Conversation: The Accidental, Ambivalent and Useless Sacred’, Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief 10(2): 239–40. Derrida, J. and E. Prenowitz. 1995. ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, Diacritics 25(2): 9–63. Doss, E. 2010. Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gardner, J.B. 2011. ‘September 11: Museums, Spontaneous Memorials and History’, in P.J. Margry and C. Sánchez-Carretero (eds), Grassroots Memorials: The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 285–303. Greenhalgh, S. 1999. ‘Our Lady of Flowers: The Ambiguous Politics of Diana’s Floral Revolution’, in A. Kear and L.D. Steinberg (eds), Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 40–59. Grijzenhout, F. 2007. ‘Inleiding’, in F. Grijzenhout (ed.), Erfgoed: de geschiedenis van een begrip. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 1–20. Hallam, E. and J. Hockey. 2001. Death, Memory & Material Culture. Oxford and New York: Berg. Houtman, D. and B. Meyer (eds). 2012. Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality. New York: Fordham University Press. Jordanova, L. 1989. ‘Objects of Knowledge: A Historical Perspective on Museums’, in P. Vergo (ed.), The New Museology. London: Reaktion, pp. 22–40. Kopytoff, I. 1986. ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 64–91. Linenthal, E.T. 2001. The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory. New York: Oxford University Press. Margry, P.J. 2011. ‘Memorializing a Controversial Politician: The “Heritagization” of a Materialized Vox Populi’, in P.J. Margry and C. Sánchez-Carretero (eds), Grassroots Memorials: The Politics of Memoria­ lizing Traumatic Death. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 319–45. Margry, P.J. and C. Sánchez-Carretero (eds). 2011. Grassroots Memorials: The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Meyer, B. 2006. ‘Religious Sensations: Why Media, Aesthetics and Power Matter in the Study of Contemporary Religion’. Inaugural Lecture, 6 October 2006. VU University Amsterdam.

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Meyer, B. and M. de Witte. 2013. ‘Heritage and the Sacred: Introduction’, Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief: Special Issue Heritage and the Sacred 9(3): 274–81. Miller, D. 2009. Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press. Morgan. D. (ed.). 2010. Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief. New York: Routledge. Passariello, P. 1994. ‘Sacred Waste: Human Body Parts as Universal Sacraments’, The American Journal of Semiotics 11(1/2): 109–27. Santino, J. 2006. Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memoralization of Death. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Stengs, I. 2011. ‘Sacred Waste: Matter and Meaning in Mourning’, Tenth Death, Dying and Disposal Conference, Nijmegen, 9–12 September. Radboud University Nijmegen. ———. 2014. ‘In Conversation: Sacred Waste’, Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief 10(2): 235–38. Sturken, M. 2007. Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Van Beek, G. 1996. ‘On Materiality’, Etnofoor 9(1): 5–24. Vroom, W. 1997. Het wonderlid van Jan de Witt en andere vaderlandse relieken. Nijmegen: SUN. Walter, T. 2008. ‘The New Public Mourning’, in M. Stroebe (ed.), Handbook of Bereavement Research and Practice: Advances in Theory and Intervention. Washington DC: American Psychological Association.

Concluding Comments

10 Heritage under Construction

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Boundary Objects, Scaffolding and Anticipation

David Chidester

Sense and Essence focuses on sensory engagements as essential in the cultural processes and productions of heritage; heritage is always c­ onstructed – invented, assembled, staged and performed – and yet always, in a myriad of ways, consequential in the real world and often experienced as really real. The editors pose a dialectical challenge to our understanding of relations between people and things in heritage formations: how do we really fabricate the real thing? How do real things really fabricate us? Here I want to highlight three elements of this dialectic that strike me as important crosscutting themes in the chapters of this book – boundary objects, scaffolding and anticipation. In his chapter on the baiana acarajé, Bruno Reinhardt invokes the notion of the boundary object, drawing from the work of Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer (1989) on objects that find themselves situated at the intersection of different interpretive communities. The boundary object is flexible in that it is subject to multiple interpretations, but its materiality, as an object, sustains continuity through these multiple engagements. Although Star and Griesemer have objected to appropriation of their analysis of boundary objects, insisting that they intended to surface more than merely interpretive flexibility, the notion of objects being defined by their boundaries, and by the multiple crossing of boundaries, is a promising entry into the role of objects in heritage formations. Moving through the urban space of Luanda, Ruy Blanes directs our attention to scaffolding, a recurring but generally overlooked feature of

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heritage sites. Scaffolding tests a visitor’s ability to imagine that it is not there even when it is so obviously present. As both material and metaphor, scaffolding is essential to the production of heritage. While material scaffolding preserves, repairs and holds heritage sites together, metaphorical scaffolding, such as legal scaffolding, surrounds heritage formations, enabling but also limiting their production. Heritage mediates time, modulating relations between past, present and future. Introducing the category of ‘anticipatory heritage’, Irene Stengs identifies an important feature of heritage – its orientation towards a future. Not merely the past in the present, heritage is a contested site for anticipating and facilitating future cultural formations. Anticipatory heritage is a time machine, generating imaginative journeys into the future, and a symbol bank for investing cultural material in expectation of future dividends. Like boundary objects and scaffolding, anticipation appears in most of the chapters of this book as a significant dimension of heritage.

Boundary Objects In their original formulation, Star and Griesemer define boundary objects as ‘objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites’ (1989: 393). Although they developed an analysis of different types of boundary objects, this dialectic of plastic adaptability and robust continuity captures the role of objects in heritage formations. Concrete or abstract, tangible or intangible, boundary objects ‘have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable, a means of translation’, providing crucial resources, according to Star and Griesemer, for ‘developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds’ (1989: 393). However, as we see in many of the chapters of this book, boundary objects can generate more chaos than coherence, more conflict than cohesion, among competing parties engaged in disputes over the interpretation, use and ownership of an object. As Bruno Reinhardt effectively demonstrates in his analysis of the Brazilian bean fritter as a boundary object at the intersection of West African traditions of baiana acarajé and evangelical Christian productions of bolinho de Jesus, boundary objects can mark borders between different interpretive communities. We find this merging of boundary objects and borders in other cases – the body markings of the Pataxó that are boundary making but also signal a ‘symbolic commerce’ across borders of indigenous communities; the ritual objects of Candomblé, at the intersection of religion and art, policing and governance, which also signal ‘border-blurred religious practices’; and the installations of the Sunday Times Heritage Project, establishing heritage sites for multiple interpretations that ‘blurred the line between heritage formation and corporate branding’. Not necessarily establishing secure

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borders, therefore, boundary objects more often than not blur the boundaries asserted by different communities of interpretation. In this respect, boundary objects are frontier objects. A frontier might be imagined as a line – a boundary, a border or a wall – but research on frontier situations has fruitfully explored the frontier not as a line but as a zone (Lamar and Thompson 1981: 7; Chidester 1996: 20–21). As an intercultural space of contacts, relations and exchanges, a frontier zone generates both conflict and cooperation in engagements over the meaning, value and ownership of boundary objects. An open frontier zone is characterized by the indeterminacy of these questions. A frontier zone closes when these questions are settled by a single dominant authority. However, such a closure never stays closed. Although the National Historical and Artistic Heritage Institute (IPHAN) exerted its dominant authority to safeguard the African meaning of the acarajé against Christian counter-claims, the baianas de acarajé association, ABAM, deployed the acarajé to open a new frontier zone at the arrival of FIFA for the 2014 Football World Cup with its own claim that the ‘acarajé is like a Holy Host’. As many of the chapters in this book show, dominant authority, whether national or international, is crucial to turning boundary objects into heritage, not only marking out their meaning, but also authorizing, regulating and policing their social place. Every authoritative closure, however, can only be expected to open new frontier zones. As a result of such authoritative efforts to enclose and police, boundary objects are often fugitive objects. It is remarkable how many heritage objects have a criminal record. As Maria Paula Fernandes Adinolfi illustrates, ritual objects of Candomblé were designated as illegal, confiscated and imprisoned by the police. Identified with the crime of sorcery, these ritual objects were locked up along with a profligate array of objects associated with the criminal activities of fraud, counterfeiting, gambling, drugs, prostitution, mental pathology and murder. These objects were all confined and displayed in the Civil Police Academy Museum. Eventually escaping this great confinement, Candomblé ritual objects attained an aura of respectability as authentic heritage. In this case, fugitive objects were rehabilitated, with their transition from prison to tombamento making them safe for society, even if neo-Pentecostal Christians continued to warn about the dangerous spiritual forces they contained. Making boundary objects safe is a recurring feature of heritage, as Marleen de Witte shows in how a heritage television production in Ghana makes tradition safe from the dangerous presence of spirit forces. However, not all fugitive objects can be rehabilitated. In her analysis of the controversy over preserving or destroying lethal weapons, the knife, the pistol and the wrecked car of recent murders, Irene Stengs identifies their dangerous potency as a challenge. If they are not destroyed, should they be locked up by the police or preserved by a museum? Fugitive objects might be confined but they might also escape. As a special type of boundary object, fugitive objects run through heritage formations.

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On the boundary of different interpretive communities, boundary objects are also at the intersection of competing claims to their ownership. As Rhoda Woets shows, African art produces ‘objects of questioning’ but also intense questions over legitimate cultural ownership. One of the supreme examples of conflict over cultural ownership is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in which a kind of negotiated truce divided the structure among different religious constituencies, but it is precisely on the borders of those different sections that conflicts tend to erupt (Armstrong 2002; Bowman 2014). Boundary objects seem especially susceptible to conflicts over legitimate ownership. In his analysis of the ethnogenesis of the Pataxó, André Bakker shows how the imitation of the objects of other indigenous communities, which can be seen as an openness to the other in a ‘symbolic economy of alterity’, has elicited allegations of illicit appropriation. According to a Xavante informant, ‘Pataxó are thieves!’. As an important aspect of heritage formations, the cultural ownership of boundary objects operates in what Kenneth Burke identified as the cultural process of the stealing back and forth of symbols (Burke 1961: 328; Chidester 2008: 93–95). They might register in a symbolic economy of alterity, but boundary objects inevitably operate in a political economy of symbolic property.

Scaffolding A website dedicated to world heritage sites features a page identifying sites that are ‘currently undergoing restoration or repair that affect the visitor experience’. The long list of such sites finds a remarkable variety of ways to use the word ‘scaffolding’, noting heritage sites that are ‘under scaffolding’, ‘covered in scaffolding’, ‘covered with scaffolding’ or ‘covered by scaffolding’. One notation observes that scaffolding ‘seems like maintaining the complete structure of the building’ (WHS 2017). How does all this scaffolding affect the visitor experience? Of course, scaffolding might be experienced as an obstacle, covering up the site. In his guide to Venice, Rick Steves advises that tourists will see monuments covered in scaffolding, an obstacle to direct experience, but they will also see scaffolding covered in advertising that adds a further layer of interference in experiencing heritage sites. In an extraordinary contribution to the aesthetics of scaffolding in heritage formations, the mayor of Venice is reported as observing, ‘It’s not beautiful. It’s not ugly. It’s necessary’ (Steves and Openshaw 2014: 45). Necessity demands covering heritage sites with scaffolding for their restoration and covering scaffolding with advertising for funding that restoration. Covering, however, as Ruy Blanes shows, is only one aspect of the experience of scaffolding heritage. Scaffolding is also revealing. It displays a commitment to the past, a promise for the future, and a substantial investment – moral, political and economic – in the production of heritage. According to Blanes, scaffolding in the changing urban landscape of Luanda is less an obstacle than an opportunity, more revealing than

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concealing, for displaying the construction of heritage as an ongoing cultural work in progress. Although scaffolding suggests that the construction is incomplete, the very presence of scaffolding, Blanes observes, already makes the buildings under scaffolding landmarks, icons and even sacred sites in the city. Extending this analysis from material to metaphor, we can see heritage formations as building projects, transacting between past and future, but also demonstrating in the present the work of culture in the making. As a work in progress, constantly in the making, Pataxó culture builds on existing forms, styles and themes, as Bakker observes, ‘thus scaffolding such motifs as distinctively Pataxó’. Not merely concealing, therefore, scaffolding reveals the cultural construction of heritage. Pursuing scaffolding as metaphor, many chapters in this book show how legal scaffolding, built out of municipal, national and international regulations, surrounds the construction of heritage. Enabling and limiting, legal frameworks interject the state into heritage construction. Even a commercial venture in heritage, such as the Sunday Times Heritage Project analysed by Duane Jethro, must fit inside a scaffolding of law. Before constructing its heritage sites in any urban area, the project had to secure formal permission from various municipal governments. In Cape Town, for example, legal scaffolding identifies the conditions for gaining permission to install public art in the city. An application must include the following: ‘signed permission from all affected property owners; digital mock-up (to scale) depicting the proposed public artwork at the proposed site; graphic representation of the proposed public artwork with dimensions; and a photograph of the intended location in its current state as well as five contextual images of surrounding properties (neighbouring properties, businesses, roads etc.)’ (City of Cape Town 2017). The application is circulated through the city council, municipal government departments and non-governmental organizations for consultation before approval or rejection by the city. Public art in the city can only be installed within this scaffolding. However, the city’s website cautions, ‘If your public art performance meets the minimum criteria for an event, then you will need to apply for an events permit’ (City of Cape Town 2017). Since the art installations were meant to be interactive, they might meet the minimum criteria for an event, but if more than one person interacted with the site at a time, the project might also have to fill out the Application for Procession, Demonstration, or Gathering in Terms of Regulation of Gatherings Act No. 205 of 1993, which defines a demonstration as a gathering consisting of fifteen people or less and a gathering as a demonstration, assembly or procession of more than fifteen people (Republic of South Africa 1994). Such bureaucracy, simultaneously vague and precise, is a hallmark of the legal scaffolding of modern heritage construction. Although heritage is supposed to be enduring, to be ‘as time-proof, people-proof, and weather-proof as possible’ in the formulation by Charlotte Bauer of the Sunday Times Heritage Project, it clearly is not, hence the

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necessity of scaffolding in heritage repair. Besides addressing the ruination of heritage sites to preserve the past, scaffolding signals a promise for the future, an investment in a future that is always under construction.

Anticipation All the chapters in this book, in one way or another, recognize the future orientation of heritage. Pataxó see their horizon as a culture for the future; acarajé sellers participate in a future-oriented heritage that canonizes pasts while thinking about futures; South African Breweries establishes beer museums to chart a ‘desired path for the future’ (Mager 2006: 159); under the effects of Dubaization, Luanda is entering ‘phantasmagorias of the future’; although looking backwards, Ghanaian Sankofaism is going forward into the future; a Ghanaian painter excavates the past for ‘messages of the future’; and the jury for the controversial statue of Anton de Kom promises that it ‘will make future generations perpetually curious’. Clearly, heritage formations do not only preserve the past; they anticipate the future. Futures, of course, can only be possible futures. In the chapters of this book, we see three broad engagements with future possibilities. First, the future can be shaped by the transmission of specific traditions. The example of the periodic destruction and reconstruction of Japanese shrines, cited by Bruno Reinhardt, is a production of the future based on the transmission of practical and sacred knowledge to new generations in the shikinen sengu tradition (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2004: 59–61). Heritage, in this respect, is not what is handed down from the past but what is transmitted to the future, ensuring the continuity of a specific repertoire of cultural objects and knowledge. Second, the future can be forged through the coming together of diverse traditions into the formation of a unified culture. As formulated by a funding proposal for the Sunday Times Heritage Project, heritage work can create a shared culture by ‘us(ing) the rich material from our past to shape the foundations of our common future’. Especially attractive to nation-building projects, this future of unity in diversity promises a unified culture of the future. Third, often under the impact of such unifying projects, the future can be experienced by adherents of specific traditions as the dangerous risk of cultural loss, fearing, as a Pataxó leader put it, that ‘a time will come when it is all gone’. These three prospects – transmission, integration and loss – do not exhaust the future orientations of heritage. But they do suggest that human beings do not all live in the same heritage future. These three orientations appear in Irene Stengs’ analysis of anticipatory heritage. We find the transmission of specific objects into the future, but the transmission is interrupted by the controversy over whether their horror allows preservation or demands destruction. An interesting deferral is proposed by supporters of preservation – let people of the future

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decide the meaning of these objects. This deferral contrasts sharply with traditional modes of transmission in which emotional attachment rather than emotional distancing represents the key to unlocking the future meanings of cultural heritage. As potential ‘secular relics’ of national identity, the weapons might be future objects of national integration, drawing an analogy with other ‘relics of Dutch national history’. Although nationbuilding projects are engines for turning loss into gain, for turning the blood spilt in violent death into the seed of the collectivity, some losses might be irrecoverable. In counterpoint to the weapons, all of the flowers, cards and cuddly toys placed at sites of collective mourning – ‘the ephemera of loss’ – pose a special problem for collecting, preserving and fashioning a unified national heritage. Collections of the ‘ephemera of loss’ do not necessarily add up to a cumulative national collectivity. As a recurring item in such collections, the cuddly toy suffers the indignity of being too numerous to preserve and too dirty to be prepared for redistribution through expensive cleaning. Transmission, integration and loss, in these cases, collide in the anticipation of impossible futures. In sensing heritage, boundary objects look different and speak differently to different audiences. Do they also smell, taste and feel different? Do the baiana acarajé and the bolinho de Jesus produce bean fritters that evoke sensory experiences of the variability of taste in a contest over food connoisseurship between competing communities of eating heritage? Here Stengs’ concept of anticipatory heritage is helpful, not only in thinking about long-term futures, but also in understanding the short-term, sometimes almost instantaneous, gap between prior expectations and the moment of consuming heritage. Anticipatory heritage is at work whenever any heritage site, practice or performance does not look right or sound right; anticipation is even more viscerally involved when heritage does not taste, smell or feel right. Of course, anticipatory heritage is also at work when expectations are met, when things feel alright. In the sensory engagement with the aesthetics of heritage, the gap between anticipatory expectations and actual experience might be closed in a second or opened into an indefinite future. Mediating the gaps, moving between closings and openings, as this book amply illustrates, is the ongoing work – simultaneously aesthetic and political – of heritage formations under construction. David Chidester is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. His publications include Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (University Press of Virginia, 1996); Christianity: A Global History (HarperCollins, 2000); Salvation and Suicide: Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown (Indiana University Press, revised edition, 2003); Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture (University of California Press, 2005); Wild Religion: Tracking the Sacred in South Africa (University of California

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Press, 2012); Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2014); and Religion: Material Dynamics (University of California Press, 2018). He has twice received the American Academy of Religion’s Award for Excellence in Religious Studies.

References Armstrong, C. 2002. ‘Divvying Up the Most Sacred Place’, Christianity Today, 1 July 2002. Retrieved 1 February 2017 from http://www.christi anitytoday.com/ct/2002/julyweb-only/7-29-52.0.html. Bowman, G.W. 2014. ‘The Politics of Ownership: State, Governance and the Status Quo in the Anastasis (Holy Sepulchre)’, in E. Barkan and K. Barkey (ed.), Choreographies of Shared Sacred Sites: Religion, Politics, and Conflict Resolution. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. ­202–40. Burke, K. 1961. Attitudes Toward History. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Chidester, D. 1996. Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. ———. 2008. ‘Economy’, in D. Morgan (ed.), Key Words for Religion, Media, and Culture. London: Routledge, pp. 83–95. City of Cape Town. 2017. ‘Apply for a Public Art Permit’. Retrieved 1 February 2017 from http://www.capetown.gov.za/City-Connect/Apply/ Licences-and-permits/Public-art/Apply-for-a-public-art-permit. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. 2004. ‘Intangible Heritage as Metacultural Production’, Museum International 56(1–2): 52–65. Lamar, H. and L. Thompson (eds). 1981. The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared. New Haven: Yale University Press. Mager, A. 2006. ‘Trafficking in Liquor, Trafficking in Heritage: Beer Branding as Heritage in Post-apartheid South Africa’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 12(2): 159–75. Republic of South Africa. 1994. ‘Regulation of Gatherings Act, 1993’. Retrieved 1 February 2017 from http://www.gov.za/sites/www.gov.za/ files/Act205of1993.pdf. Star, S.L. and J.R. Griesemer. 1989. ‘Institutional Ecology, “Translations”, and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39’, Social Studies of Science 19: 387–420. Steves, R. and G. Openshaw. 2014. Rick Steves’ Venice. Berkeley, CA: Avalon Travel. WHS (World Heritage Site for World Heritage Travellers). 2017. ‘Undergoing Restoration/Repair’. Retrieved 1 February 2017 from http://www.world heritagesite.org/tags/tag.php?id=1249.

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Can Anything Become Heritage?

David Berliner

Heritage is a crucial value in the world today. This is reflected in the fact that, all over the globe, humans share the catchy idea that something from the past, often from their past, must be institutionally preserved for future generations. There is very little opposition to it (although there are conflicted views on what should be preserved), and almost everybody nods approval to the necessity of heritage. Practically, a lot of people converge around heritage, often ‘rushing for’ it (as Maria Paula Fernandes Adolfini puts it) for diverse reasons as this book brilliantly demonstrates. In the scholarly literature too, there is so much being currently produced about heritage that I do not even have the space to begin listing it here. However, as much as patrimony is omnipresent, sometimes ad nauseam, academic literature about it seems to me to be trapped in the same repetitive rhetorical questions. Specifically, these questions circle around the idea of the social construction of heritage, taking for granted that heritage is socially and culturally constructed. Most researchers in this field – myself included – attempt to show that, around the world, groups of people interact diversely with patrimonial productions, from their own perspective, and engage in culturally contingent heritage experiences. From the perspective of ‘local people’, the epistemological step towards the denunciative ‘it is political’ is easy to make. Thus is heritage grasped – as contested, debated, politicized, resistant, multiple – and the anthropologists find themselves documenting the diversity of heritage – contested discourses, resistant practices, multiple experiences and so forth.

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Obviously, such an intellectual posture is not confined to discussions about heritage only. Anthropology itself seems to be stuck in endless arguments about the social construction versus the direct perception of reality, narratives versus laws, but also between relativism and universalism (when it is not about structure and agency). These days, the quest for universal laws has fallen out of paradigmatic fashion in favour of a denunciation of the politically powerful through critical sociology, and a valorization of localism (although globalized) expressed through cultural narratives. At the same time, my feeling is that by renouncing universalism and using differentialist perspectivism as a taken-for-granted conceptual device, we are losing something in terms of anthropological heuristics: our endeavour to account for ‘human experience’ – that is, to understand and explain the mechanisms through which humans live, albeit in diverse cultural settings. I know that, for many readers, this is probably too broad a starting point, certainly a very Lévi-Straussian one (and, dare I say, neo-Kantian), mostly rooted into the ‘universal rationalism of the French Enlightenment’ denounced in the 70s by Geertz (1973: 356). But, while many anthropological traditions are nowadays organized around cultural relativism and the necessary denunciation of injustices, there are also challenging theoretical discoveries to be made about the ‘diversely human’, if we allow ourselves to challenge a certain epistemological comfort. I believe that this, to a certain extent, is what Mattijs van de Port and Birgit Meyer, the editors of this invigorating book, wish to convey when it comes to heritage issues. They invite us to move beyond the dominant social constructivist approach, already lucidly deconstructed by Ian Hacking (2000). It is indeed not enough to say, in a Pavlovian answer, that heritage is social, cultural or political. Nor is it sufficient, as they write in their ­introduction, to describe it as ‘invented’, ‘assembled’ or ‘staged’. This cannot be the answer. Actually, this is where our interpretive performance starts as anthropologists. Now, in resonance with the texts of this volume, I would like to suggest some more ways in which social constructivist approaches may be complemented. In particular, I wish to offer some ­ avenues to better approach the complex human processes through which heritage takes place and to explain how and why these processes are being deployed in specific cultural and social environments. In order to do so, I suggest we ask two sets of questions. Firstly, can anything and everything become heritage? Is any object, cultural practice and monument eligible to be heritagized? Reading the chapters of the book, I wondered why the cocar feather headdress (André Bakker), the acarajé cuisine and dress (Bruno Reinhardt) and the Sankofa statue (Rhoda Woets) became heritage, and not other significant cultural items? More generally, why certain cathedrals, sacred groves, castles, temples and rituals are likely to be heritagized and others are not? I consider this to be a crucial question concerning the catchiness of ideas and practices, and yet it is notoriously absent from debates about heritage (and

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in anthropology, in general). However, offering a clear answer to it is far from straightforward. A multiplicity of intertwined causes intervenes in the desire to patrimonialize. A site or an object may have strong political and historical connotations, whether it symbolizes a nation state or a community of individuals. They often represent important economic stakes for heritagizers, or are connected to ancient or present-day religious practices. There are many reasons, usually entangled like a ball of wool, for heritagization. Most of the time, social scientists scrutinize the transformative process through which an item or a place becomes heritage. In her brilliant essay ‘La Fabrique du Patrimoine’ (2009), Nathalie Heinich lists a set of social values (antiquity, authenticity, rarity, significance, beauty) that would constitute the minimal ingredients necessary to transform a monument into a ‘heritage’ monument. In a similar vein, Van de Port and Meyer argue that one must take into account both the ‘politics of authentication’ and the ‘aesthetics of persuasion’ that will turn sensual forms into consecrated heritage. Likewise, Brumann, Bortolotto and myself have shown that, in many different contexts, by attempting to preserve sites, UNESCO experts as well as national conservation professionals effectively transform them, producing new social, political, economic and aesthetical arrangements (Berliner and Bortolotto 2013; Brumann and Berliner 2016). However, there remains some impensé in this kind of analysis. It is always as if the object, the place, the ritual were hanging in the air waiting to be heritagized and, to paraphrase Latour, expecting to be turned into something ‘social’ by the social scientist. There is no doubt that historical, political, social and economic forces crucially matter in accounting for heritagization. But my query would be: what about the object, the site and the ritual per se? Are there any inherent, intrinsic qualities to sites, objects or gestures that make them catchy enough to become patrimoine? Something about their size, surfaces, colours, texture, localization, rhythm, sound, taste; something sensual that makes them more likely to be noticed by a human observer, to trigger specific emotional reactions and to produce long-lasting memories about them? In other words, do buildings, practices and objects hold inner iconic properties? And how may these influence (or not) the heritagization process? Well, there is no easy response to offer here either, as very few researchers tackle these complex issues at the intersection of anthropology and psychology. In a recent article, Joel Candau and Maria Mazzucchi Ferreira (2015) have coined the notion of ‘heritage affordances’ (affordance patrimoniale) to better understand the eligibility of some items to become heritage. Rooted in Heideggerian and Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, pioneered by ecological psychologist James Gibson (2015 [1979]), the notion of affordance has received a great deal of attention by social scientists, for better or worse. I do not have the space to delve into these discussions, except to emphasize that the concept is aimed at thinking through the meaningful action-based relationships between organisms, including human organisms, and their environment.

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Precisely, Gibson meant to show how, without taking the detour of representationalism, our environment affords certain types of behaviours (a chair affords sitting, a mailbox affords posting a letter, etc). According to him, objects and places intrinsically contain some of the conditions of their usage. Although I am unsure about applying the notion to all domains of life as an exclusive explanative trick, it sounds important when it comes to heritage experiences where materials play a crucial role. Whether it deploys architects’ or tourists’ experiences, heritage, above all, consists of active sensual engagements with materialities. By their size, colours and localization, temples and churches afford certain types of postures and behaviours in all humans, triggering ‘technological enchantment’ on purpose (to use Alfred Gell’s idea). In his contribution, Ruy Blanes shows how the massive decorative elements of the new Tokoist cathedral of Luanda – high gates, open patio, fountains, golden lion statue – ‘achieve a particular status of grandeur, abundance and persuasion’ and therefore constitute iconic media ‘for a process of public “authorization”’. Similarly, because of their extraordinary visual and acoustic dimensions, rituals afford specific reactions in the audience (fear, pride, surprise, and other forms of emotional reaction and contagion). Take those frightening African masks that were secretly carved to produce fear among non-initiates. Interestingly, the very same masks today continue to trigger emotional reactions in EuroAmerican museum visitors who do not participate in the typical context of past performance. What is at play here is the technological enchantment that activates shared psychological responses to such visual stimulation, a technical trick used by the Dutch artist Van Berkum (portrayed in Markus Balkenhol’s chapter) to reinvent an ancestor mask of the Afro-Surinamese Winti religion in the Netherlands. In a nutshell, what Candau and Mazzucchi Ferreira (2015) show in their piece is that some places and practices hold stronger heritage affordances than others. To exemplify, they make a comparison between two types of professions relying on quite similar olfactory skills: perfumers, oenologists and cooks on the one hand, and forensic pathologists, gravediggers, nurses and thanatopractors on the other. Whilst both involve developing a sharp olfactory expertise, only the first type, they say, are likely to be patrimonialized. As they bathe in pleasant smells, perfumers, oenologists and cooks tend to produce nostalgic self-narratives linked to youth experiences and family traditions. For authors, such delightful odours constitute affordances for narrativity and, later on, heritagization. By contrast, in the case of professions linked to death, the smells imply cognitive painfulness (pénibilité cognitive) and, therefore, patrimonialization is too costly and rendered impossible. Whilst such distinction seems simplistic to me (many heritage items and sites refer to painful past and may sound, a priori, impossible to patrimonialize: consider Auschwitz, a UNESCO site since 1979), and their use of the notion of affordance is too vague, I am sympathetic with such effort to highlight some intrinsic phenomenological

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conditions involved in the catchiness of objects, sites and social forms. Far from abandoning the classical approach in terms of social representations, it could help us better understand the concatenation of causes contributing to the cognitive and affective salience and the success of heritage sites and objects. Certainly, not all sites and objects can become heritage. In parallel, reflecting on the rich diversity of contributions contained in this volume, there is another set of theoretical questions that I find essential to investigate about the personal attachment that certain individuals develop to heritage. First of all, let me clarify: there are many people involved in a heritage process, from those who are passionately committed to preservation to the indifférents. In between these two extremes, one finds a continuum of individuals with diverse interests and motivations vis-à-vis heritage. However, in the field, many of us have met those heritage militants whose desire for preservation seems always defined as a lonely struggle against the ‘bad’ locals (who are said not to know how to preserve), the ‘wrong’ (non-authentic) materials, the ‘corrupt’ local authorities (who negotiate unauthorized modifications) and the ‘ignorant’ tourists (who pervert the spirit of the place). I have shown elsewhere that nostalgia is an important driving force for such heritage-makers (Berliner 2012), a nostalgia for historical grandeur that is materialized through past architectural and cultural productions, often combining a strong emotional attachment to place or objects with an articulate scholarly discourse on the arts and culture of the region. Bruno Reinhardt introduces us to Rita and Eliene, two Brazilian baianas: sellers of acarajé, an African-based cuisine and dress from Salvador de Bahia that has been recognized as national intangible heritage. Whilst Eliene represents the typical example of a person experiencing poverty who turns to heritage mainly for financial reasons, Rita is originally from Rio, a complete outsider who has become one of the main representatives of the tradition in town and is now the president of the local association of baianas. My interrogations follow the same epistemological direction as those I have previously asked, namely: why do some individuals – like Rita – build an intimate relationship with an object or a place to the extent that they become conservation developers or amateur preservationists? Can anybody become a heritagizer? Why do some people turn into ‘heritage militants’, as some develop a passion for nature and the protection of environment? Here again, I believe that classical sociological explanations miss some crucial aspects of the problem and that we need to complement them by looking at the learning process of the ‘education of attention’. In a stimulating book, Loving Nature (2002), Kay Milton discusses how and why some people are environmentalists. Building on psychology, cognitive science, philosophy and ecology, she delves into the multifaceted mechanisms through which certain people learn to know about nature, to identify with it, to feel deeply about it, to value it and, then, to decide to

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actively protect it. Milton is not interested in social and cultural contexts, but rather in the ways in which individuals ‘learn to relate to the world in a particular way’ (2002: 2). To understand ‘why is it that, for some of us, the sight of an otter turns our world upside down while others don’t even wish to know about it’ (ibid: 55), she invokes a diversity of cognitive and affective ingredients about ontological and experiential domains: humans have the capacity to personify nature, they may identify with personalized non-humans and deploy a relational epistemology when they feel related to them in responsive ways (experiencing enjoyment, anger, fear, etc.). Unfortunately, beyond its extremely stimulating premises, Milton’s ­approach is somewhat frustrating, mostly because she refuses to engage in dialogue with more traditional sociological views. To grasp why some ­individuals grow a particular interest towards nature, one cannot ignore the intricate social scaffoldings through which they are educated to attention within their family, at school and in the media (see the chapter by Marlene de Witte in this volume). Cognitive and experiential abilities cannot be separated from these dimensions. To conclude these brief comments, I would like to ask the same question about heritage. Does it work similarly for heritage preservationists and amateurs? What would the minimum ingredients of the heritage desire be? Without being able to answer this question exhaustively, given the economy of this text, I wish to suggest some avenues of research to be followed. First of all, the desire for heritage rests on the assumption that a place, an object or a cultural practice, objectified as unique, is threatened. Although I expect some colleagues to disagree with me on this, I am inclined to think that it also presupposes some philosophy of irreversibility, a hypothesis about the passing of time seen as irreversible (heritage being the human ‘antidote’ to this temporal inevitability). Family, peers, school education and the media play an absolutely fundamental role, as they constitute the social scaffolding through which attention to heritage is created and reinforced. Most importantly, ideas of ‘threat’ and ‘irreversibility’ must be inserted into a personal narrative. To me, this is one of the crucial aspects to apprehending heritage desire. Heritage defenders always have a story of themselves to tell about the relation they have with the place, the object or the practice. This narrative is biographical. Usually highly emotional, it deploys the relational epistemology that was woven between a nostalgic individual and the heritage to be preserved. Through the narrative, loss is mine. And even if it was not my own loss, it becomes mine. David Berliner is Professor of Anthropology at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. His books include Perdre sa culture (Zones Sensibles, 2018), Mémoires religieuses Baga (Somogy éditions d’art, 2014) and the edited volumes World Heritage on the Ground: Ethnographic Perspectives (Berghahn, 2014, with Christoph Brumann); Anthropology

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and Nostalgia (Berghahn, 2014, with Olivia Angé); and Learning Religion: Anthropological Approaches (Berghahn, 2007, with Ramon Sarro). He is a past editor of the EASA journal Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale.

References Berliner, D. 2012.  ‘Multiple Nostalgias: The Fabric of Heritage in Luang Prabang  (Lao PDR)’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18(4): 769–86. Berliner, D. and C. Bortolotto. 2013. ‘Introduction: Le monde selon l’Unesco’, Gradhiva 18: 4–21. Brumann, C. and D. Berliner. 2016. ‘Introduction: UNESCO World Heritage –Grounded?’, in C. Brumann and D. Berliner (eds), World Heritage on the Ground: Ethnographic Perspectives. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Candau, J. and M.L. Mazzucchi Ferreira. 2015. ‘Mémoire et Patrimoine: Des Récits et des Affordances du Patrimoine’, Educar em Revista 58: 21–36. Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic. Gibson, J. 2015 [1979]. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. London and New York: Psychology Press. Hacking, I. 2000. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Heinich, N. 2009. La Fabrique du Patrimoine: De la Cathédrale à la Petite Cuillère. Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Milton, K. 2002. Loving Nature: Toward an Ecology of Emotions. London and New York: Routledge.

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Heritage as Process

Ciraj Rassool

This rich collection marks a landmark moment in the deepening of our understandings of the complexities of heritage as simultaneously produced or created, yet also experienced as real, and as a site of persuasion, authentication and authorization, yet also a domain of contesting and challenging authority. While certainly coming at a time of the ever expanding field of heritage studies, this collection brings us a wide range of Brazilian, Ghanaian, South African, Angolan and Dutch cases in a bold comparative assembly, generating its own distinctive understandings and analyses. These original directions might be the outcome of the ways this project emerged as an unusual meeting of anthropology, heritage studies and the study of religion. And the distinctiveness of the arguments of this project to deepen our understanding of heritage production lie in its central driving concepts of the ‘politics of authentication’ and the ‘aesthetics of persuasion’, which also contribute to an appreciation of heritage as ‘sensational form’, as simultaneously a sensing or feeling, as well as a process of making sense. It is worthwhile taking some time to locate this volume within the broad contours of the critique of the discourse of heritage as inheritance, with heritage objects, sites and practices understood as real inheritance to be cared for and preserved for future generations. This is a critical field of scholarship in which heritage has fruitfully been understood as a mode of power and authority, as imposed through dominant ideology, or marketed as a commercial product (Davison 1991; Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996;

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Harvey 2001). This idea of heritage as made for political power or as part of commerce has also been understood as an inferior domain of producing the past, and as a terrain of falsification, exaggeration and myth-making, even posing a threat to the work of history (Lowenthal 1998). Just as much as such hierarchical approaches to expertise and the politics of the past attracted the accusation of ‘heritage-baiting’ (Samuel 1994: 259–73), in South Africa the critique of hierarchies and heritage denigration drew ­attention to the variety of practices of history that had escaped the classroom as well as the outreach efforts of social history and its projects of popularization (Rassool 2000). The culmination of this critique has undoubtedly been the emergence of critical heritage studies, turned into a new field of scholarship, with its own journal, the International Journal of Heritage Studies, and its academic society, the Association of Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS), which has held biennial international conferences since 2012. Laurajane Smith has situated herself as the main promotor of critical heritage studies through her book, Uses of Heritage (2006), the co-edited volume, Intangible Heritage: Key Issues in Cultural Heritage (2009), editorship of the IJHS and as a founder of the ACHS. She has argued that heritage is a ‘cultural and social process’ that ‘engages with acts of remembering that work to create ways to understand and engage with the present’ (Smith 2006: 2). She also argues that ‘all heritage is intangible’, as a means of removing the privilege accorded to the material or tangible, understood as the selfevident form and essence of heritage. This ‘material’ concept of heritage generates a ‘Western’ physicality of the idea of heritage whose consequence is that it can be ‘mapped, studied, managed, preserved and/or conserved, and its protection may be the subject of national legislation and international agreements, conventions and charters’ (Smith 2006: 3).1 For Smith, heritage is a constitutive cultural process, reflecting contemporary cultural and social values, debates and aspirations and a ‘multilayered performance … of visiting, managing, interpretation or conservation’, and is always a ‘cultural and social process’ of ‘negotiation’, over ‘using the past, and collective and individual memories, to negotiate new ways of being and expressing identity’. She also argues that heritage is also an ‘authorised’, professional discourse that ‘privileges expert values and knowledge about the past and its material manifestations, and dominates and regulates professional heritage practices’. Smith’s work, and the field of interdisciplinary heritage studies, highlights how heritage is authorized as a discourse, and identifies and discusses the role expertise plays in legitimizing various heritage activities, and provides a way of understanding the possibilities and modes of heritage contestation (Smith 2006: 4–5). While the ‘potential impact of alternative heritage’ as a means ‘to build community’ and ‘negotiate change as progress is held back by consensual approaches’, it is also apparent that critical heritage studies continued to work with a sense of disciplinary hierarchies. Heritage, Smith says, is

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‘something vital and alive. It is a moment of action, not something frozen in material form’ (Smith 2006: 82–83). In the process, Smith effectively situates critical heritage studies into a frame where the academic practice of social history – drawing on agency, experience, memory, locality and performances in and of community – becomes the means to contest and change the structures of authorized heritage. This politics of heritage ‘from the bottom up’ happens from the site of the academy, or through the disciplinary expert in heritage studies, and this is where the critical side to the process is deemed to come from (Smith 2012: 538). There are thus no shared enquiries or shared authorities, only communities with identities that can use critical heritage to renegotiate their values and meanings outside of sanctioned history and authorized heritage. Thus, for Smith and much of critical heritage studies, there is little appreciation and engagement of constituted and reconstituting publics. Indeed, as far as Smith is concerned, the public does not exist. Heritage is but a current process where identity is negotiated and networked culturally and socially in the abstract, or according to the proclamations of the heritage researcher. For Smith, then, there are no differentiated, or distinctive forms and practices of public knowledges, or engagements therein, or productions of knowledges about pasts. Rather there is the need to popularize the ­understandings of the authorized heritage discourses and their dissonances, to translate these into communities, and assist communities to gain agency, to establish new networks and to reconstitute identities based on the cultural and social processes involved. Critical heritage studies reproduces the logics of that which it set out to criticize (Witz, Minkley and Rassool 2017: 219). Notwithstanding these different routes to the critical, the avenues of debate about heritage continue to locate the past outside of history, while ironically drawing upon the reality effects of the social. In turn, history is folded into critical heritage studies as foundational and empirical, appropriating the approaches and methodologies of social history. Unwittingly these appropriations demonstrate their logics and limits. Agency and experience, as deployed within the unremarked bounds of the nation state and within the narratives of modernity, and defined by these approaches to identity, are about the founding liberal subject of history: the ‘individual irreducible sovereign citizen’ (Witz, Minkley and Rassool 2017: 220). Leslie Witz, Gary Minkley and I have argued how the constructions and contestations around critical heritage in contemporary South Africa have been marked by similar trajectories. We have become increasingly cognizant of how much these processes are being drawn into and recast through a power/knowledge connection into a heritage complex. Here, critical heritage, claimed as critical, and authorized through academic autonomy and an ethics of scholarly concern, has installed a ‘politics of atonement’, which ironically supports the grounds and underscores the edifices of the heritage complex and its structures of power and authority. The expertise of discipline, the hierarchy of knowledge and the distinction between

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the locations of intellectual thought and heritage practice have been left unchanged. Critical heritage studies become part of the practices of power, disciplinary procedure and institutional apparatus of this heritage complex through which knowledges about pasts are expressed. And it is precisely from within this complex of knowledge and power that heritage is seen to be about the social and cultural processes of forming identity and belonging, about ‘relations of governance and citizenship and about extending the benefits of expertise’ (Witz, Minkley and Rassool 2017: 220–21). In elaborating upon this heritage complex, Witz, Minkley and I have shown how the pasts of the new South African nation have been turned into a repository through ‘management, conservation and regulation of public visibility and access’. A ‘distinctly post-apartheid modern complex of inheritance’ has been inaugurated out of ‘an assemblage of narratives, institutions and disciplines’, granting access to the meanings of South Africa’s pastness through public instruction. Through the spectacle of public education ‘on how to see and be seen’, the new state encompasses and asserts personal identities and histories as the new, inclusive, citizenry. Pageantry, memory and inheritance are spatially positioned. And past and present are publicly assembled through visitation, and memorialized and visualized in the commemorative state through public gatherings on national days, where spectatorship is authorized. The indigenous and resistance are brought together in this complex to declare the ‘end of history’ and the ‘unity of the new nation’ (Witz, Minkley and Rassool 2017: 221–22). In establishing that Critical heritage studies ultimately remains part of the ‘authorised heritage discourse’, it is also worthwhile considering new ‘affective’ approaches to heritage that have sought to move beyond the representational. Such research has argued for forms of research that ‘focus on the energies, realities, and responses of actual bodies as they move around and interpret spaces that present pasts’ (Waterton and Watson 2015: 97). With heritage understood as ‘a complex and embodied process of meaning- and sense-making’, it becomes possible to study the ‘affective worlds’ that shape the ‘narratives of affect’ that shape their reception, ‘tapping into everyday emotional resonances and circulations of feelings’. For Emma Waterton, this has meant moving away from the ‘static’ artefact or site to ‘questions of engagement, experience and performance’. Places of heritage become ‘multi-sensual’ sites, ‘alive with intense and often lingering sounds, smells, and sights’. As a result, heritage is understood through ‘the body, practice and performativity’, and engagements with heritage ‘occur through a range of embodied dispositions and interactions’ (Waterton 2014: 823–24; see also Micieli-Voutsinas 2017: 93–104). In questioning the claims of Critical heritage studies, Witz, Minkley and I have sought to extend Bennett’s discursive understanding of the birth of the modern museum to the structures and operations of heritage (Bennett 1995). Approaches to ‘affective heritage’ by Waterton, Micieli-Voutsinas and others have presented new ideas for transcending the textual, visual

310

Ciraj Rassool

and representational, and opening new ways of connecting heritage scholarship and heritage practice. In many ways, the work gathered in this volume complements the discursive and the affective through the emphasis on ‘historically situated regimes of sensibility’ and ‘the persuasive force of the aesthetic’. Mattijs van de Port, Birgit Meyer and their colleagues have shown how heritage formations can be productively understood beyond the government of sites and objects, involving instead structures of feeling that are part of ‘affective-sensorial relations’, which are a significant element of processes of persuasion and authentication. This volume also represents a significant moment in reorienting the conventions of heritage scholarship, which generally locate theory in ‘the West’. This book is not only a comparative examination of heritage, the sensible and the aesthetic in Latin America, Africa and Europe. It also represents a collection of research by scholars from Latin America and Africa in conversation with European scholars that is not simply the presentation of data but in some ways stands as an expression of ‘theory from the South’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012). What requires some thought now is what implications these fresh insights might have – not for a renewed heritage studies and for rethinking the practice of heritage itself, but for what a reconstituted practice of heritage in the South might require. This, I suspect, might need a reexamination of the categories and classificatory systems in which we work, an evaluation of the ways heritage continues to be framed by the strictures of the nation, and a critique of the enduring manifestations of coloniality. Ciraj Rassool is a professor in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape, where he also directs the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies. He serves on various councils related to heritage in South Africa, including the Human Remains Repatriation Advisory Committee of the Department of Arts and Culture. He has written widely on public history, visual history and resistance historiography, and has published in the Journal of African History, the Journal of Southern African Studies, Cahiers d’etudes Africaines, African Studies, South African Review of Sociology and Kronos: Southern African Histories.

Note 1. Here I draw upon research conducted over many years with my colleagues Leslie Witz and Gary Minkley. See Witz, Minkley and Rassool (2017: 216–22).

References Bennett, T. 1995. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. New York: Routledge.

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Comaroff, J. and Comaroff J. 2012. ‘Theory from the South: Or, How EuroAmerica Is Evolving Toward Africa’, Anthropological Forum 22 (2): 113–131. Davison, G. 1991. ‘The Meanings of “Heritage”’, in G. Davison and C.  McConville (eds), A Heritage Handbook. North Sydney: Allen and Unwin, pp. 1–13. Harvey, D.C. 2001. ‘Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents: Temporality, Meaning and the Scope of Heritage Studies’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 7(4): 319–38. Lowenthal, D. 1998. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. New York: Cambridge University Press. Micieli-Voutsinas, J. 2017. ‘An Absent Presence: Affective Heritage at the National September 11th Memorial & Museum’, Emotion, Space and Society 24: 93–104. Rassool, C. 2000. ‘The Rise of Heritage and the Reconstitution of History in South Africa’, Kronos 26: 1–21. Samuel, R. 1994. Theatres of Memory. London: Verso. Smith, L. 2006. Uses of Heritage. New York: Routledge. ———. 2012. ‘Editorial’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 18(6): 533–40. Tunbridge, J.E. and G.J. Ashworth. 1996. Dissonant Heritage. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons. Waterton, E. 2014. ‘A More-Than-Representational Understanding of Heritage? The “Past” and the Politics of Affect’, Geography Compass 8(11): 823–33. Waterton, E. and S. Watson. 2015. ‘Methods in Motion: Affecting Heritage Research’, in B.T. Knudsen and C. Stage (eds), Affective Methodologies: Developing Cultural Research Strategies for the Study of Affect. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 97–118. Witz, L., G. Minkley and C. Rassool. 2017. Unsettled History: Making South African Public Pasts. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Index

• Index

ABAM (Baianas de Acarajé Association) 77, 87–88, 94–98, 100–102, 293 abará 79, 81 acaçá 78, 79, 103n3 acarajé 7, 23, 25, 26, 75, 77–81, 83–89, 91–100, 102, 103n1–3, 128, 293, 296, 300, 303; frozen 102; powdered 84. See also baiana de acarajé; fritter, bean; fritter, Jesus Accra 28, 182, 189, 196, 212, 214, 216, 226 acculturation 42, 45 Achimota School, Gold Coast 217, 221 activist(s) 29, 125, 240–241, 244; ANC 146; black 82, 112, 121; ethnic 183; feminist 82; gay 82; heritage 162; political 240 Adabraka Drama Group 196, 200 aesthetic(s) 1, 2, 20–24, 26–27, 32n23, n27, 41–42, 44–45, 52, 54–55, 57–59, 67–68, 77, 82, 89, 125, 139, 142, 159, 162–163, 165, 167, 174, 183–184, 188–190, 195, 206, 215, 221, 224, 248, 255, 260, 269, 281, 301, 310 architectural 171; body 57; heritage 171, 297; of patchwork 223; of persuasion 1, 6, 16, 19, 20, 23–24, 58, 69n5, 165, 183, 202, 239, 250, 260, 301; of scaffolding 165, 294; performance 189; politics and 190, 238, 297; public 145

aesthetic; dispositions 113; envelope(s) 165, 172; field 183, 248, 260; form(s) 184, 217–218; formation(s) 21–22, 89; modification(s) 188; norms 218; pleasure 192, 202, 205 Aesthetics of Authenticity 19 Africa 25, 77, 79, 89, 94, 120, 167, 187–188, 192–193, 218, 220, 227, 251, 260, 310 authentic 229; Central 220; precolonial 219; postcolonial 184; West 188 African-American 17, 191, 207n5, 223 Africanness 79, 112, 122, 205, 223, 258. See also Pan-Africanism African personality 186–187, 195, 207n2, n3, 222, 229 African renaissance 222, 251 Afropolitanism 192 agency 4, 23, 100, 103, 140, 300, 308; political 167, 176 aisthesis 20, 67 Akoi-Jackson, Bernard 225–229, 231n16 alienation 16, 84, 96, 100, 127, 187, 205, 207n11, 213, 242; cultural 220, 229 Alken, Abaysa 243-245, 248 alterity 25, 43-44, 46, 70n20; symbolic economy of 57, 294 altruism 27, 152 Amado, Jorge 82, 123 Amandzeba 200, 202

314 Index

Amerindians 44, 46, 68 Amnesty Law, Brazil 119 Ampofo, Oku 216, 219–221 Amsterdam 29, 225-226, 231n15, n16, 242–245, 247, 254–255, 261n8, 261n12, 268, 270–271, 277, 278, 285n11 Angola 2, 27, 126, 160–164, 169–171, 174; New 170; northern 124 Ansah, Kwah 191–192, 196 Anstey, Gillian 139, 145 anthropologist(s) 1, 2, 3, 21, 43, 48, 53, 71n25, 83, 85, 88, 89, 112, 128, 161, 167, 213, 27; eminent 122; French 62; nineteenth-century 278 anthropology 2, 267, 300–301; philosophical 21; physical 13; sins of 5 anthropophagism 110, 116 anti-essentialism 120, 204. See also essentialism antiquity 301; classical 23 apartheid 7, 23, 26–27, 137–138, 141, 144–148, 150, 152, 153, 154n11, 309 Aponé 59–67 appropriation 6, 22–23, 25, 29, 44, 88, 99, 118, 129, 130, 137, 172, 187, 188, 206, 214, 219, 220–221, 227, 242, 244, 291, 308; illegitimate and inauthentic 87; illicit 294; ritual 85 architecture(s) 112–113, 143, 159, 167, 172; Angolan 160; competing 167; dead 176; fascist 10; Luso-Brazilian 26, 111; luxurious 162; materiality of 165–166; modern 160, 162; modernist, in Brazil 113; public 27, 170; prestige 213; religious 167; socialist 10; transient 158; urban 177 archive(s) 17, 149–150, 153n2, 154n12, 270, 285n9, 286n26; Amsterdam City 270; audio and video 152; colonial 53; cultural 82; Enschede City 270; governmental 266; historical 147; Internet 32n23; news 141; South African History (SAHA) 148 Aristotle 20, 23–24, 33n29, n30, 67, 249

art(s) 19–22, 27, 28, 32n23, 32n27, 33, 67, 112, 119, 123, 140, 143–144, 152, 186, 215–229, 230n4, 231n14, 292, 303; African 187, 191, 217, 221–223, 231n9, 245, 254, 256–257, 294; Brazilian 131n1; contemporary 28, 225; ethnographic history of 11; European 217, 221; Ghanaian 28, 212, 218, 220, 224, 229, 231n11; global 231n14; globalization of 214; hierarchies of 221; impressionistic 222; indigenous 216–217, 220; in South Africa 146; Luso-Brazilian 26, 111; martial 85, 109, 128; modern 28, 214–215, 225, 231n8, 231n11; of rhetoric 249; performing 127, 185, 186, 188, 190–191, 204; primitive 116, 117; public 26, 143–144, 152, 295; religious 251; traditional 186, 215; tribal 207n11; visual 187, 192, 214, 256 Art at Work arts management company 143–144 artefact(s) 10, 12, 77, 116, 118, 192, 215, 231n7, 238, 270, 309; ethnographic 117; historical 13; indigenous 115; metacultural 76, 89, 100; traditional 191, 214, 218, 223, 228, 229. See also object; thing artisan(s) 12, 41 artist(s) 8, 9, 28, 82, 110, 122, 143–146, 152, 187, 212, 214, 217–230, 230n3, 231n8, n10, n11, n14, 245, 247; African 28, 221, 223–224, 228, 249, 256–257, 259; Afro-American 223; Afro-Surinamese 245; avant-garde 219–221; black 258; Brazilian 131n1; commercial 214; conceptual 143, 225, 229; contemporary 28; Dutch 29, 241, 250, 302; European 217, 228, 231n10; Ghanaian 28, 221–222, 230; -in-residence 225; modern 214–222, 229; multimedia 224–225, 229; postmodern 228; state 217; visual 212, 216; white 250, 258–259 art market(s) 3, 28, 212, 226, 229 art pieces 139, 224, 240

Index 315

art school(s) 218, 231n8; Medlock, Manchester 222–223. See also College of Art artwork(s) 28, 112, 113, 132n3, 191, 212, 214, 215, 221, 223–224, 231n8, 249; abstract 247; commissioned 251; public 295 Association of Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS) 307–308 Atlantic Philanthropies 146–147, 153n6, 154n11 authentication 13–14, 25, 27, 29, 104n7, 132n14, 182, 250, 257, 260, 306, 310; Bantu 120, 124; politics of 1, 6, 13, 24, 29, 68, 89, 96, 124–125, 239, 240, 250, 260, 301, 306 authenticity 3, 6, 11, 13–16, 19–20, 24, 27, 28, 31n18, 32n19, 68, 69n5, 84, 96, 104n7, 112, 113, 123, 124, 128, 148–150, 201, 203, 217, 227, 239–240, 250, 256, 273, 279, 281, 301, 154n10, 158, 183–185, 190, 192, 197–199; aesthetics and 42; African 184–185, 194, 197, 207n5; Conference on, Nara, Japan 15; cultural 26, 92, 184, 188, 204–206, 208n17, 208n20, 236; indigenous 44; scientifically established 282; test of 15 autochthony 49; cultural 82 Awôy, 53, 59, 61, 71n26 axé 50, 85, 92, 94 Bahia 2, 7, 25, 26, 41, 43–44, 62, 66, 77–79, 82–91, 94, 96, 99–102, 103n4, 113–114, 120–123, 127–129, 132n11, n12, n15, 303; Faculty of Medicine of 116–117; Federal University of 26, 52, 53, 119; idea of 82, 87–89, 100; northern 55; southern 2, 45, 49, 69n2 Bahianess 85, 99 Baiana(s) de Acarajé75, 77, 79, 81–102, 103n4, 104n6, 291–293, 297, 303; authentic 86, 95; evangelical 84–85, 93, 96, 100; facade 96. See also ABAM baianinha 96 Bakongo 27, 124, 178n9

Barra Velha village 48–49, 56–57, 66 BASA (Business and Arts South Africa) 146 Bassline Studios, Johannesburg 144–146 batik(s) 192, 227 Bauer, Charlotte 136–143, 153n4, n5, 295 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 20, 32n23 beauty 20, 41, 212, 218, 219, 229, 267, 301 beetle painting 59, 61, 62, 64–65, 67 belief(s) 3, 5, 70n20, 85, 118, 121, 167, 199, 239 Belliot, Hannah 244, 245 belonging 1, 16, 20, 24, 87, 114, 120, 190, 203, 205, 206, 227, 237, 253, 258; sentiments of 1, 87 Belting, Hans 225, 231n14, 238–239, 249, 255 Benjamin, Walter 41, 67, 69, 71n31 biography 16, 78, 84, 95, 99, 147, 154n7, 170, 304; of things 99; social 98 Black Community Council, Bahia 94–95 body 21, 28, 42, 46, 67, 69n4, 70n16, 185–186, 201–204, 206, 208n21, 218, 225, 246, 255, 270, 281, 309; and mind 32n23; authenticating 184, 204, 206; dancing 204; Christian 224; moving 202; muscular 246; ritual (re)use of 285n2 body adornment 25, 68, 292 body aesthetics 57 body images 208n17 body paint 25, 42, 44, 47, 54, 56–57, 59, 61–64, 66, 68, 71n27, 130, 201 bolinho de Jesus 77, 292, 297 Bon 222–224, 228–229. See also Offei Nyako, Benjamin book(s) 9, 47, 56, 58, 62, 64, 112, 128, 146, 149, 217, 267, 303, 307; Applied Arts 132n6; Archeological, Ethnographic and Landscape 115; art 221; commemorative 148; didactic 56; Fine Arts 115; Historical 115; school 56, 215. See also notebook; textbook

316 Index

Bortolotto, Chiara 158, 301 boundary/ies 71n24, 75, 82, 84, 117, 214, 220, 291–294; ethnic 46, 207n9; normative 92. See also object, boundary boundary-making 68, 77, 292 Bourdieu, Pierre 21, 57, 113 bow(s) and arrows 43, 48, 68 brand(s) 27, 137–140, 152, 191–193, 196 branding 28, 138, 151, 152, 191–192, 196, 205, 226; Christian 85, 100; commercial 137; corporate 139, 292; ethnic 93, 102; religious 93 brass 215, 219, 253 Brazil 2, 7, 25, 49, 50, 76, 79, 81, 84, 87, 89, 93, 94, 98, 112, 114, 120, 121, 122, 125, 128, 167; contemporary 75; discovery of 45; indigenous peoples in 57; northeastern 3, 111; traditional 44 Brazilian National Development Bank (BNDES) 43 Brazilianness 82 Britain 31n11. See also United Kingdom bronze 144, 145, 153n4, 191, 207n11, 225, 245–246, 261n10 Brumann, Christoph 31n12, 301 Buitenman, Edouard 240, 242–244, 247, 249 Bucknor, Kobina 218–221, 229, 231n10 bureaucrat(s) 82, 121; cold 31n17; colonial 78 bureaucratization 13131n3 caboclo(s) 25, 41, 44, 68, 70n7, 121; Candomblé de 125 Cabral, Pedro Álvares 48, 49 Caminha, Pero Vaz de 43, 48, 70n12 candles 266, 268, 270–271 Candomblé 23, 25–26, 77, 79–83, 85, 87–92, 94, 96–97, 99–100, 102, 109, 114–119, 122–125, 129–130, 132n9, n14, n15, 293 canon(s) 13, 26, 54, 56, 66, 83, 123, 125, 128, 184, 258; Pataxó cultural 25, 69; ethnological 25; heritage 214; historical 237; national 184, 205,

214, 222, 237; of cultural truth 8, 47; of truth 6 canonization 1, 25, 52, 89, 100–102, 117, 169, 216, 296; cultural 47, 54; ethnographic 125 Cape Town 137–139, 295 capital 153; cultural 113, 118; economic 78; late- 3; political 78, 94; start-up 141; symbolic 57 capitalism 137; corporate 138; neoliberal 138; state 178n2 capoeira 60, 85, 109, 111, 112, 124, 128, 130, 131 carnival(s) 7; Rio de Janeiro 83; Salvador 85, 132n11 caruru 78, 79, 81, 83 castle(s) 14, 300; Loevestein 279–280 cathedral(s) 27, 166–167, 177, 300; Methodist, Luanda 161; politics of 167, 174; Tokoist, Luanda 168–171, 302 Catholic(s) 9, 43, 49, 89, 93, 279. See also church, Catholic Centrum voor Beeldende Kunst (CBK, Center for Visual Arts) 249 charity 274, 275; Christian 97 charlatanism 82, 99, 116, 124 chief(s) 28, 49, 51, 60, 182–183, 188, 198–199, 201, 203, 204, 208n13, n14, 208n16, 212, 250 chieftaincy 198–199, 207n4, 208n13, n14, 216 choreography 28, 125, 201–202, 204 Christianity 31n13, 49, 84; Catholic; conversion to 46; evangelical 26, 84–85, 89, 91, 97 (see also church, evangelical; evangelical). See also Catholic; church, Catholic church(es) 9, 84, 88, 97, 98, 104n6, 113, 115, 159, 166, 172–175, 178n11, 302; Baptist 172; baroque 129; buildings 31n13, 174; Catholic 44, 81, 87, 98, 114, 118, 122, 167, 172; Christian, of the Union of the Holy Spirit (Igreja Cristã da União do Espiríto Santo –ICUES), Angola 172, 174, 176; evangelical 96, 97; Franciscan 113; Holy Spirit 174; ICUES 172, 174, 176; membership

Index 317

31n13; Mpeve na Nlongo 174; Neo-Pentecostal 124, 132n15; NeoPentecostal Deus é Amor, Bahia 96; new 172; official and mutineer 175; Pentecostal 84, 167, 190 (see also churches, Neo-Pentecostal); religiousphagic 85; Santo Daime 257; Tokoist 167–171, 176, 178n7; Universal, of the Kingdom of God 85, 167, 172 church cathedrals, Luanda 166 Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição da Muxima, Luanda Church of our Lady of Barroquinha, Bahia 114 Church of our Lady of the Rosary, Bahia 115 Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem 294 Chuva, Márcia 87, 113 citizenship 1, 87, 90, 109, 126, 153, 253, 309; critical 152; culturalization of 1, 236–237 civilization 48, 81; baroque 113; colonial model of 207n5; European 82; higher 219; Lusotropical 82; original 110; pre-Islamic 9 class 82, 83, 121, 138, 148; middle 125, 136, 153n1192; popular 78; upper 70n22, 111, 153n1; working 16 clay 103n2, 130, 212, 215 cocar(es) 54, 57, 60, 300 Coe, Cati 183, 187, 189, 215, cognition 22. See also recognition cohesion 292; social 30n1 Colecão Perseverança 116 collective(s) 1, 6, 11, 45–46, 58; indigenous 46 College of Art; Kumasi 223; Royal, London 231n10. See also Art School colo 191, 196 colonialism 8, 186–187, 217, 236, 242, 259. See also decolonization; neocolonialism; postcolonialism colonial mentality 186 Comité een waardig monument voor Anton de Kom (Committee for a dignified monument for Anton de

Kom) 240, 242–244, 248–249, 261n4 commemoration(s) 8, 238, 268, 270–271, 275; collective 268; Flight MH17 275; formal 270; national heritage 44, 48; of abolition 255; of slavery 238; public 143, 145 commerce 307; symbolic 46, 292; with exteriority 46 commodification 84, 205 community 8, 10, 11, 28, 32n23, 79, 90, 127, 148, 182–183, 194, 197–198, 203, 204, 208n14, 259, 301, 307, 308; Afro-Surinamese 245; black 244, 258; Candomblé 96; Dutch 235; Ga 194; heritage 146; imagined 2, 4, 10, 261n3; Jewish 143;local 8, 183, 195, 205; moral 123; national 231n12; Nungua 205; production of 167; senses of 1; Surinamese 245 (see also community, Afro-Surinamese); Winti 257 competition(s); cultural 189, 216 conference(s); 1992 United Nations, on Environment and Development, Rio de Janeiro 42; 1994 Nara, on Authenticity 15; 2014 Nara +20, on Heritage Practices, Cultural Values and the Concept of Authenticity, Florence 15 conflict 9, 41, 159, 160, 161, 170, 174, 176, 177, 244, 292–294, 299; black and white 249; chieftaincy 208n13; post-independence 178n3; secession 174; social 90 Conklin, Beth 42, 68, 69n4, 69n6, 208n17 consciousness 54; black 119–120; popular 145. See also unconsciousness Constitution Hill, Johannesburg 147, 154n8, n9 constructedness 3, 5, 75, 96 construction(s) 3, 9, 22, 27, 29, 31n115, 48, 75–76, 113, 120, 159, 160, 162, 163–167, 169, 170, 172, 214, 216, 224, 226, 267, 275, 295, 296–297, 299, 308; abandoned 174; Catholic 161; church 159; cultural 2, 295;

318 Index

construction(s) (cont.) discursive 76; heritage 217, 227, 229, 260, 291, 295, materiality of 165; memory 285n4; mere 20; narrative 88; of authenticity 231n9; social 5, 140, 250, 300; symbolic 111. See also reconstruction constructivism 3, 20, 75, 158, 170, 177, 300 consumer(s) 27, 71n24, 82, 89, 98, 153n1, 204–205, 227–228 consumerism 137, 191 consumption 70n16, 79, 83, 97, 137, 141, 148, 149, 200–201, 218, 297 conversion; professional 172; to Christianity 46 copy/ies 11, 62, 141, 256 copying 25, 55, 59 corpo-reality 19, 27, 182, 186, 203, 206; craft(s) 7, 13, 49, 51, 53, 62, 67, 212, 214, 220, 221; acarajé 77, 83–84, 86–89, 93–96, 98, 100–101, 128; Japanese washi 7; traditional 77, 127. See also handicraft; witchcraft crafting 53, 54, 57, 174 Cubism 116, 221 cuisine; Bahian 83; regional 25; ritual 128; West-African 25 cult(s) 119, 125; Afro-Brazilian, of Bahia 96; Candomblé 91; devil’s 90; Egungun 257; fetishist 117; secular relic 279. See also objects, cultic culture(s) 1, 2, 8, 12, 15, 24, 30n2, 41, 44, 47, 49–53, 55, 58, 60, 66–68, 70n20, 71n24, 76, 90, 92, 109, 118, 121, 126, 129, 137, 158, 161, 182, 184, 185, 187, 193, 194, 196, 198, 202, 203, 206, 207n1, 207n8, 207n11, 219; African 187, 193, 215, 217, 218, 221, 223, 227, 229, 231n10, 236, 271, 296, 303; African versus European 187; AfroBrazilian 26, 91, 114, 121, 128; Afro-Surinamese 257; and religion 43, 118; Angolan 162; Bahian 82, 88, 90, 103n4; Brazilian 25, 77, 81, 87, 88, 122, 128; commemorative 266, 267, 285n6; comfort 268; dance 189, 190; Dutch 236; Dutch minister

of 11, 14; ethnic 208n21; Ga 194; Ghanaian 189, 212, 215, 217; global entertainment 203; global media 193, 205; in-the-making 47, 54, 295; leisure 141; living 12, 50; local 82; material 91, 92, 98, 99, 160; Ministry of (Angola) 162, 164; Ministry of (Brazil) 110; national 81, 112, 187, 205, 215, 219; Pataxó 43, 45, 49, 51, 54, 55, 57, 58, 66, 69, 295; popular, 83–86, 99, 122, 126, 146, 183, 190, 191, 207n5; pre-colonial 222; preIslamic 31n16; rescue of 25, 50; ritual and royal 194; stealing of 60; teacher(s) of 49, 52, 53, , 56, 58–60; traditional 189, 221; Viennese Coffee House 7; Western 195 culture and entertainment industry 190 culture-making 1, 2 culture war(s) 85 curation 12, 148, 150, 154n8, 228 curator(s) 147, 217, 225, 228, 231n16, 254, 283, 284 Da Costa Lima, Vivaldo 103n1, 123 Dai, Numo Bo, III 200–202 dance(s) 7, 28, 49, 50, 53, 98, 125, 128, 188–190, 196–197, 200–202, 204, 207n8, n9, n10, 212, 216, 251, 253, 255, 262n24; Akan 189; Dagomba 189; ethnic 207n9; Ewe 189; Ga 195, 202; Ghanaian 189; Nungua 196, 201; traditional 183, 188–189, 199, 202, 258; tribal 187; West African 202 De Andrade, Mario 111, 126, 128 death 17, 120, 169, 170, 238, 267–269, 274, 279, 283, 285n5, 302; fear of 268; Our Lady of Good 114; violent 266–268, 279, 282, 297 De Bijlmer, Amsterdam 244, 245, 261n7 decolonization 187, 191 deconstruction 3, 4, 6, 30n2, 112, 217, 224, 227, 300 De Jong, Ferdinand 9, 31n5, 76, 184, 187, 204, 205, 213, 214, 227 De Kom, Anton 29, 240–250, 255, 257–259, 261n4, n8, n12, n13, n14, 262n17, n20, 296

Index 319

demiurge(s) 58, 67; cultural 55, 67; mythical 55 democracy 8, 12, 137, 140, 150, 190, 222, 242; cacaphony of 26, 103; liberal 121; racial 87, 112. See also democratization; redemocratization democratization 150, 204 demolition 7, 9, 10, 161–163, 177 demons 85, 90, 100, 190 desire(s) 6, 14, 16, 18, 19, 69, 102, 138, 141, 185, 186, 191, 204, 236–237, 238, 259, 277, 281, 296, 301, 303; heritage 304; tourists’ 89 dichotomy/ies 5, 28, 187, 214 difference(s) 11, 17, 18, 68, 228, 268; class 138; cultural 15, 30n1, 112, 137; ethnic 112; grammars of 89; politics of 30n5; race 138; religious 84; social 109, 121. See also diversity discourse(s) 2, 6, 23, 26, 54, 57, 123, 128, 160, 204, 213, 215, 220; artistic 28, 216; authorized/authoritative 76, 309; black Atlantic 259; civil rights 262n25; consumerist 137; contested 299; conventionalized 57; cosmopolitan 28; cultural 8; free market 137; Ghanaian 207; global 28; hegemonic 99; heritage 8, 12–13, 15, 26, 76, 100, 138, 159, 186–187, 190, 204, 214, 306–309; essentializing 3; media 112; official 26, 89, 100; policy 15; political 112, 121; postcolonial 187; professional 307; public 170; racial democracy 87; reconciliation 154n11; religious 26; scholarly 15, 303; totalizing 3; urban 162 discovery 17; celebrations 59; of Brazil 43, 45, 48, 49, 70n12; of heritage items 7; of primitive art 116 discovery Indians 45, 48, disenchantment 14, 20, 239 disinheritance 8. See also inheritance disposition(s); aesthetic 113; bodily 121, 130; demonizing 85; narrative 158; semiotic 158. See also habitus distinction(s) 91, 111, 116, 184, 262n18, 302, 308; analytical 16;

brand 192; ethnic 3, 82; racialized 261n9; regional 82; social 120 distinctiveness 57, 58, 68, 109, 113, 119, 121, 126, 136, 138, 231n12, 295, 306, 308; cultural 46 diversity 7, 28, 30n1, 55, 189, 271, 299, 303, 304; cultural 8, 111, 237, 271; demographic, institutional and spatial 178n10; unity in 186, 189, 195, 207n6, 296. See also difference doxa 113, 121 drum(s) 196, 212, 216 drumming 125, 187, 189, 196–197, 202, 206, 207n9, 216; neo-traditional 189; traditional 206 Eagleton, Terry 18, 22, 32n23, 227 Eliene 93, 96–102, 303 elite(s) 82, 118; Angolan ruling 27; colonial 113; Surinamese political 244 embodiment 21, 23, 103, 145, 183, 198, 203, 283 emotion(s) 16, 17, 19–24, 29, 32n20, 33n30, 185, 204, 218–220, 224, 229, 236–237, 242–243, 260, 261n6, 266–267, 269, 274–277, 282–284, 297, 301–304 enchantment 20, 256–257; technological 302 Enlightenment, the 14, 20, 32n23; French 300 enskillment 104n11 entanglement 16, 26, 44, 93, 227, 236–237, 238; cultural 8, 187, 230; human–object 23; modes of 16 environment(s) 42, 50, 88, 96, 301– 302; audiovisual 151; cultural and social 300; foreign 231n10; global media 191; immediate 225; politicalaesthetic 23; protection of 50, 303; rural 212, 222; secular 118; urban 144, 212; work 89 environmentalist(s) 82, 303 essence(s) 5, 6, 11, 13, 16, 20, 22, 23, 44, 95, 120, 204, 206, 236, 237, 239, 259; African 28, 187; and spice 201; authentic 198, 201; collective 183; cultural 186, 190, 198, 260;

320 Index

essence(s) (cont.) of heritage 307; of a nation 207n2; of chieftaincy 208n14; religious 102; sacred 198; spiritual 198 essentialism 5, 8, 15, 75, 95, 100, 120, 138, 184, 187, 203, 208n20, 214, 222, 237, 240, 258; strategic 31n4. See also anti-essentialism essentialization 15 Estado Novo 82, 110, 122 ethics 24, 32n23, 59, 67, 276; of conviction 84; of invention 47, 58, 69; of scholarly concern 308 ethnic groups 70n14, 109–110, 124, 160, 186, 188–189, 197, 216, 55 ethnicity 3, 4, 9, 27, 30n1, 45–46, 53, 54, 59, 66, 69n7, 78, 82, 91–93, 95, 99–102, 109, 111, 112, 114, 120, 121, 127, 128, 132n4, 171, 183, 186–189, 195, 203–204, 207n4, n9, 208n21, 215, 226 ethnogenesis 1, 3, 45, 46, 70n7, 294 ethnography 2, 76, 83, 88, 89, 115, 116, 117, 123–125, 132n13, 165, 166, 176, 238, 240, 262n24, 272 ethnology 45 eugenics 81–82, 122 equality; social 109, 112. See also inequality Eurocentricity 15, 76, 81 Europe 2, 7, 10, 13, 19, 25, 30n1, 222, 252; Africa and 227, 310; artists in 219; goods from 79; Islam in 9; medieval 6; memorial projects in 142; museums in 118; rise of 261n3 evangelical(s) 25–26, 77, 84–102, 103n5, 292 evidence 14, 31n15, 118, 117, 130, 202, 216, 282; factual 13; material 7, 281; of human remains 13; of crime 116–117; exploitation 11, 13, 120, 208n20, 227 experience(s) 4, 5, 12, 14, 18–21, 23, 51, 59, 60, 89, 118, 120, 123, 125, 130, 139, 143, 147, 158, 160, 202, 203, 204, 206, 237, 239, 242, 250, 258, 266, 267, 269, 281, 291, 296, 297, 299, 302, 306, 308, 309; affective 185, 189; authentic 89, 185,

218; cinematic 208n19; collective 127, 136; embodied 188; heritage 299, 302; human 300; interpretive 221; leisure and recreational 137; lived 6, 112, 185; messianic 170; of inequality 164; personal 16, 148; religious 257, 267–268; sensory 67, 185, 204, 239, 284, 297; shared 16; slave 258; temporal 27; urban 159; visitor 154n8, 294 Exu 79, 88, 92, 94. See also Orisha Exu fabrication 2, 4, 5, 13, 22, 76–77, 158, 213, 239, 256, 259, 291; Chinese 162; cultural 158; of cultural heritage 237, 239 fact(s) 4, 5, 6, 10, 15, 16, 17, 20, 23, 27, 44, 51, 75, 98, 110, 115, 126, 159, 165, 166, 167, 172, 174, 198, 203, 228, 239 241, 247, 258, 262n24, 280, 299; hidden 196; historical 198; social 130 factuality, aura of 19 fake(s) 112, 120, 226; authentic 5; real and 4 fakeness 19, 158 faking 5, 96, 101 Falser, Michael 15, 31n12 Fanon, Frantz 217, 242 fantasy/ies 16, 18; colonial 29; African urban 164 Fassie, Brenda 144–146 feathers 4, 25, 42–44, 48, 49, 51, 60, 68, 121, 219, 230n3, 300 feeling(s) 4, 18, 22, 30n1, 33n30, 115, 122, 137, 167, 202–204, 206, 207n9, 208n19, 217, 220, 236, 267, 300, 307, 309; structures of 22, 227, 310 feminism 82, 119 FENACAB (Federation of AfroBrazilian Cults of Bahia) 96, 129 festival(s) 182, 194, 199; Biennales Art 225; cultural 188, 193, 215, 216; public 104n8; traditional 28, 183, 188, 193 fetish(es) 116, 223, 224, 229 fetishism 117, 123, 208n15 FIFA 94, 293 film(s) 18, 19, 24, 62, 191, 207n11, 270

Index 321

film container 270–271, 285n16 film director(s) 270 filmmaker(s) 29, 191 film producer(s) 147 First Contact 43, 70n12 flowers 118, 130, 268–270, 273–274, 297 Fonseca, Maria Cecilia 110, 111, 116, 126, 131n2 food 23, 25, 70n16, 77, 78, 81–83, 88–89, 92, 94, 97, 99, 102, 103n2, n3, 193, 297; ceremonial 79; Orisha’s 92; ritual 79; sacred 98; street- 96; vile 78, 99 forest(s) 7, 50, 51, 62, 70n23. See also deforestation; rainforest Fortuyn, Pim 29, 261n5, 268, 270–277, 282–284, 285n16 Fosu, Kojo 218–219, 222, 231n8, fragmentation 14, 89, 121, 150, 213 framing 9, 16, 22, 24, 46, 99, 119, 124, 137–138, 142, 149–150, 154n10, 170–171, 184, 186–187, 194, 222, 223, 224, 236, 244, 247, 257–258, 269, 283–84, 308, 310; racial 247 framework(s) 2, 158, 160, 164, 165, 166, 167, 170, 186, 205, 225; analytical 283; conceptual 12; discursive 194; global 195, 205; heritage 25; institutional 110, 212; legal 45, 295; narrative 256, 258 freedom 78, 81, 94, 120, 130, 139; artistic 251; of expression 216; of information 153; of mobility 78; religious 81, 90–92, 100, 102 freedom fighter(s) 216, 245 Freedom Park, Pretoria 139, 153n7 Freyre, Gilberto 82, 112 friction(s) 76; interethnic 45 fritter 83, 103n1; bean 7, 25, 79, 83, 96, 98, 292, 297; Jesus 26, 77, 85 (see also bolinho de Jesus). See also acarajé function(s) 113, 144, 158, 188, 189, 208n16, 224, 229, 277; body 218; public 272 Ga 28, 182–183, 193–196, 200, 202, 208n16

Geertz, Clifford 19, 300 Gell, Alfred 32n27117, 167, 302 gender 84, 100, 101, 121, 153n2 genuinely made-up 5 Germany 10, 20 Ghana 2, 9, 79, 182, 185, 187, 190, 194, 205, 213, 215–220, 228, 230, 231n8, 237, 293; northern 219; urban 203 Ghana Dance Ensemble 186, 197 Ghana Television 188, 193 Gibson, James 301–302 Gilroy, Paul 120, 258, 259 God 10, 97, 278 goddess 251, 255, gods 41, 79, 117, 201, 224; African 79 Gold Coast 187, 217, 221, 228, 231n8. See also Ghana Gordillo, Gastón 166, 171 grammar(s); of difference 89; of sensing 67–68 Griesemer, James 78, 99, 291–292 habitus 111, 113, 122; hegemonic 128; institutional 129; popular 130; royal court 123. See also disposition Hacking, Ian 75, 76, 100, 300 handicraft 43, 48, 54, 57, 59, 127. See also craft Harvey, David C. 6, 164, 307 hegemony 22, 76, 82, 93, 103 heritage(s) 2, 6, 7, 8, 10–15, 19, 20, 22–29, 30n1, 32n19, 67, 68, 75, 76, 87–89, 92–94, 96, 97, 100, 102, 109, 110, 113, 126, 136–139, 142, 146–148, 150, 152–153, 159–162, 164–5, 184–188, 190, 192–194, 199, 200, 203–206, 207n1, 207n6, 207n11, 213–219, 222, 224, 226–230, 231n10, 237, 239–240, 243, 260, 266, 278, 281, 284, 291–293, 295–296, 299–304; African 28, 29, 98, 100, 122, 129, 130, 131, 182, 183–188, 190–192, 195, 212, 214–215, 224, 226–227, 229, 251, 257; Afro-Brazilian 109, 114, 129, 170, 171, 174, 183; anticipatory 29, 159, 267, 281, 292, 296–297; authentic 293; Bahian 91; baroque 114; Brazilian 109; colonial 115,

322 Index

heritage(s) (cont.) 237–238; community 203–204; construction of 76, 217, 295, 299; controversial 98; cultural 2, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 19, 22–25, 27–28, 30n1, 31n13, 46, 53, 69, 87, 94 98, 101, 109–113, 116, 117, 121, 124, 126, 27, 129, 131n2, 131n3, 151, 158, 182, 186, 188, 190, 193, 198, 203–204, 207n2, 213, 215–217, 230, 230n7, 231n12, 236–237, 239–240, 251, 253–254, 256, 259, 260, 272, 276, 297; culture and 15, 24, 84, 193, 227; diasporic 236, 250; Dutch 224–225; empty 160–161; future 281, 283, 284; Ghanaian 28, 212, 214, 216–217, 222, 224; human 228; hybrid 187; immaterial 109; indigenous 52; instant 159, 177; intangible 7, 75, 76, 77, 79, 84, 87, 93, 94, 98, 101, 102, 110, 123, 127, 128, 130, 216, 230n7, 237, 303; intellectual 122; material 22, 129, 139, 151, 272; national 9, 26, 44, 48, 71n24, 77, 111, 114 118, 121, 128, 129, 160, 183, 188, 195, 203, 213–215, 223, 229, 236–238, 276, 297, 303; natural 98; precolonial 212–213; post-apartheid 152; postcolonial 187; public 27, 139, 148; religious 27, 87, 176; religion and 75–76, 81, 93, 100, 101; safeguarding of 111, 215; social 228; tangible 126, 237; world 12, 15, 31n12, 31n16, 70n23, 94, 114, 161, 294 heritage agencies 7, 8, 12, 126, 213 Heritage Africa 191, 207n11 heritage-baiting 307 heritage buzz 6–7 Heritage Day 152 heritage formation(s) 1, 2, 6–8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 20, 22, 24–27, 29, 30n1, 31n12, 69, 75, 109, 137, 138, 139, 144, 159–160, 165, 167, 176, 177, 204, 230, 267, 283, 291–295, 297 heritage form(s) 2, 9, 20, 23, 27, 45, 137, 139, 143, 206, 230 heritage industry 2, 13, 23, 75, 103

heritage institutions 2, 138 heritage items 7, 8, 20, 302 heritage-making 6, 7, 22, 30, 76, 102, 158, 184, 186, 188, 200, 203–204, 28–239, 259, 260, 303 heritage objects 15, 18, 222, 237, 240, 260, 293, 303 heritage politics 32, 44, 45, 68, 112, 186, 243–244 heritage project(s) 26, 27, 136, 137–140, 145–148, 150, 154n10, 154n11, 259, 260, 292 heritage regimes 15 heritage rush 26, 121, 299 heritage site(s) 15, 31n18, 161, 162, 292, 294–297, 303 heritage studies 2, 6, 22, 30n2, 31n11 heritage virgins 143 hero(es) 244, 279; Afro-Surinamese 242; National 120; maritime 286n25; political 140; revolutionary 242 hierarchy/ies 57, 123, 126, 244, 307, 308; art world’s 214; colonial 187; cult 125; disciplinary 307; European, of art 221; Western epistemic 44 historian(s) 13, 32n19, 94, 113, 128, 138, 277; art 128, 262n18 historicity 10, 76 history/ies 3, 6, 10, 11, 31n17, 32n19, 45, 51, 76, 98, 137–139, 145, 148, 151, 161, 187, 194, 198, 201, 203, 221–222, 230n1, 249, 250, 259, 269, 277, 282, 307–308; African 91, 193, 196, 258; Afro-Brazilian 91; Afro-Surinamese 257; Art 117, 215, 249, 258; assembled 2; Bahia 90; Candomblé 110; city 254 (see also history, town); colonial 45, 220, 228, 259; craft 88, 94, 100; community 198; cultural 150; culture and 8; Dutch 29, 236, 248, 261n5, 269, 276–281, 297 (see also history, Netherlands); end of 159, 309; future 29, 277; Ghana 229; heritage and 137; in the making 148; lost and neglected 148; migration and settlement 202; military 160; MPLA 161; musical 145; national 29, 112, 132n6, 236, 269, 276–281, 284, 297;

Index 323

Netherlands 262 (see also history, Dutch); news 27, 136–137, 139–142; object 227, 276; oral 77, 80, 148; Pataxó 66; people’s 205; places of no 164; political 166, 272; precolonial 137; preservation, of 281; public 137, 148, 152, 153n2; sanctioned 308; shared 258; social 138, 145, 307–308; South African 27, 140, 148–151; Suriname 242, 247, 257, 259; texts/textbooks 120, 154n8; tomorrow’s 139; town 28, 182–183, 199, 201–202 (see also history, city); victorious 178n3; Windlust 11; world 69; homogeneity 30n1, 102, 112, 125 hybridity 55, 82, 98, 187, 207n5, 237; cultural 227 hygiene 86, 93, 94; bourgeois notions of 81 IBAMA (Brazilian National Environmental Agency) 50 ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) 15 icon(s) 159, 238, 242, 259, 295; cultural 78; religious 4, 239; of baianidade and blackness 123; of heritage 183, 225; of cultural integrity 25; of Dutch history 248; of non-conformity 120; of the nation 111; of world heritage 10 iconicity 25, 48, 77, 82, 87, 96, 99, 169, 225, 238–239, 250, 259, 301 iconic image(s) 14, 247, 255, 276 iconic media 302 iconic object(s) 236–260, 286n29 iconic presence 238–239 iconoclasm 10, 237, 244, 278 iconoclasts 11 identification(s) 14–19, 45, 186, 188, 189, 195, 205, 236, 240, 244; diasporic 238; emotional 204; modes of 237 identity 1–5, 8, 14, 20, 30n1, 77, 79, 82, 99, 117, 152, 186, 205, 227, 242, 260, 292, 307–309; African 28, 184, 188, 190, 192, 205, 207n3, 218, 221, 224, 229, 231n12; Afro-Brazilian 114; Angolan 160–161; Bahian 84,

87, 100; black 124, 247; brand 193; Brazilian 88; cultural 160, 203–204, 214, 215, 230; diasporic 242–243, 258; Dutch 225; ethnic 45; heritage and 9, 224; individualized 205; national 109–110, 112, 129, 151, 161, 183, 188, 190, 216, 219, 229, 237, 297; religious 167; true 14, 187 identity formation 131, 190, 309 identity politics 25, 46, 68, 158, 186, 244 ideology 112, 158, 306; communist 177n2; of abundance 167; of mestiçagem 82; racist 112; semiotic 165 idol(s) 10, 200 image(s) 16, 29, 42–44, 47, 55, 57, 62, 67, 69, 99, 102, 124, 130, 145, 150, 151, 154n8, 191, 217, 241, 243, 247, 249, 257, 259–260, 267, 295; African 191, 196, 223; alternative 229; body 17, brand 27, 138; clichéd 226; colonial 240; computer-rendered 252; dialectical 67; iconic 14, 247, 255; of Brazil 111; photographic 259; physical 262n19; popular 143, 260; sculptural 223 image-power 44–45, 54 imagery 113, 242, 244; body 202 imaginary/ies 18–19, 70n8, 187, 261n3; alternative, of memory 9, 214; educated 70n8 imagination(s) 10, 137, 164–165, 183, 207n1, 207m5, 221, 222, 230, 245, 247, 251, 252, 262n19, 281, 285n6, 292, 293; alternative 5; collective 164; empathic 16; national 280; political 162; popular 67, 70n8; symbolic 249; Western 25 Independence; Angola 162, 170, 178n3, n8; Ghana 186–187, 190, 207n3, 208n15, 214–217, 220–221; Mozambique 161; Suriname 242, 244 Indian authenticity 69n5 Indian(s) (American) 3, 25, 41–43, 54, 59, 60, 68, 70n7, 112; Amazonian 208n17; Caeté 110; discovery 45; Kariri Xocó 51; Kuikuro 61; North

324 Index

Indian(s) (American) (cont.) American 62; Pataxó 25, 41, 43, 54, 66, 69n2; savage 43; Wajapi 127; who-lost-their-culture 68; Xavante 55. See also Amerindians Indian Day, Brazil 48, 50, 64 Indianness 57, 68, 69n5 indegenes 197–198 indigenous collectives 45, 46 indigenous groups 3, 55, 57, 110, 119, 137. See also ethnic groups indigenous lore 46 indigenous organization(s) 42, 46 indigenous people(s) 2–3, 26, 42, 45, 46, 51, 52, 57, 59, 68, 70n7, 113, 127; Amazonian and Central Brazilian 45; Brazilian 62, 82 indigenous remainders 42 indigenous rights 45 indigenous school curriculum 50 indigenous society 68 indigenous sociology 46 indigenous teachers 52, 70n19 indigenous territory 50 Indirect Rule; British 188, 198 industrialization 84, 93, 110, 219, 221 inequality 164, 227–228 infrastructure 165–166, 173–174; invisible 177; material 174; politics and poetics of 173 inheritance 8, 247, 306, 309. See also disinheritance Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity 7, 130. See also heritage, intangible; UNESCO Intangible Heritage: Key Issues in Cultural Heritage 307 integration 128, 144, 175, 176, 215, 296–297; full 81; Indian 69n7; national 297; social 236; societal 30n1 integrity 15, 277; cultural 25, 42, 68; moral or social 246 intellectual(s) 28, 82, 110, 123, 131n1, 187, 240; Afro-Surinamese 29; leftwing 112; modernist 110, 113, 117 International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites 15

International Indigenous Commission (IIC) 42 International Journal of Heritage Studies 307 internet 24, 32n23 invention 3, 46, 54–55, 61, 66–68, 257; and convention 57, 61–62, 67; cultural 57; ethics of 47, 58, 69; traditions of 68; urban 120 IPHAN (National Institute of Artistic and Historical Heritage, Brazil) 26, 77, 79–80, 86–89, 91, 93–94, 98, 101–102, 103n1, 110–113, 115–116, 122–123, 126–129, 131, 131n2, n3, 132n5, n7, 293. See also SPHAN irrationality 7, 208n15, 238 Islam 9, 16, 31n15, 285n12 Islamist(s) 9, 10, 270 James, C.L.R. 243, 261n3 Jandaya 59, 60, 64 Japan 7, 15, 101, 110, 296 Jaquiera Reserve 50–54, 57, 59–62, 64–65, 70n1971n24 Jogos dos Povos Indígenas 59–60, 66, 71n29 Johannesburg 138, 144–146, 148, 154n9 Juari 52, 60–61, 65 Juruna, Mario 41, 44, 70n22 Kant, Immanuel 20, 32n23, 300 Keane, Webb 57, 69n5, 78, 99 Ketu 114, 126; Nagô- 124–125 Kirschenblatt-Gimlett, Barbara 12, 76, 98, 101, 237, 296 knife 10, 29, 270, 276, 281–282, 286n29, 293 knowing 4, 14, 17, 18, 20, 202; modes of 165 Knowing Africa 193 knowledge(s) 12, 20, 27, 51, 53, 60, 67, 127, 137, 140–141, 143, 147–150, 175, 193, 198, 207n1, 231n7, 308; about pasts 308–309; academic body of 53; archival 150; authentic 198; canons of 54; criminological 117; cultural 198, 296; democracy of 150; expert 307; factual 269; geographies

Index 325

of 165; hierarchy of 308; historical 139, 148–149, 152; legitimate 139; medical 117; of Cubism 221; power and 308–309; practical 101, 296; public 308; religious 79; sacred 296; technical, historical and anthropological 13; traditional 198 Koptyoff, Igor 78, 84, 244, 276 Kros, Cynthia 148, 153n2 Kudowar, Wisdom (Wiz) Edinam 213, 230n3 Kuikuro 61, 71n29 Kumasi, Ghana 222, 223, 231n13 Kuntunkunu 199 KwaZulu-Natal 139, 154n12 landmark(s) 87, 159, 161, 164, 169, 306; architectural 169; religious 161 landscape(s) 14, 115, 140, 159, 160, 166, 169; Chaco 166; cultural 7; Dutch 12, 31n17; empty 163; heritage 142, 160; plural 177; religious 167; South Africa’s 140; urban 294 language(s) 18, 52, 70n8, 103, 109, 124, 125–126, 129; artistic 225; cultural 121; diversity in 271; English 141; Ga 182, 193, 195; German 15; local 188; Pataxó/Patxohã/Atxohã 47, 49–50, 52–53, 55, 66; Portuguese 53; racial 153n3; ritual 125–126; scientific 13; Umbundu 172; vernacular 187 Latour, Bruno 4–5, 23, 77, 238–239, 261n9, 301 legacy/ies 6, 159; African 25, 77, 218; ancient 10; colonial 187, 212, 220, 224; corporate 118; Fortuyn’s 272; historical 1, 9, 12–13, 14, 183; national 111; non-Islamic 10; pre-colonial 212; pre-Islamic 9; pseudo-Islamic 10; of Ghana Dance Ensemble; of Jewish community in Berlin 143; of the slave trade 10; online 150; Romantic 15; Sunday Times 27, 140, 150 legitimacy 8, 27, 47, 87, 113, 138, 148–150; cultural 150; social and political 170

legitimation 123, 125, 159, 160; public 166, 169–170; social and political 169 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 45, 62, 300 libation(s) 193, 201, 219 liberalism 89, 100, 142, 186, 190, 236, 308. See also neo-liberalism lieu(x) de memoires 119, 243 lifeworld(s) 3–4, 67, 68, 120, 218, 262n22; Afro-Brazilian 26 Liga de Defesa do Património Cultural (Cultural Heritage Defense League, Angola) 161 likeness 239, 247, 249, 255 Likeness and Presence 239 literature 19, 31n3, 123; academic 299; anthropological 45; ethnological 69n2; scholarly 299; sociological 112 Lo-A-Njoe, Stanley 243, 247, 261n4 locality 174, 308 Loevestein party 279. See also castle, Loevestein logic(s) 8, 24, 62, 110, 116, 126, 159, 165, 183, 221, 308; infrastructural 174; of affective and seductive architecture 167; of canonization 89; of conflict and dissent 176; of corporate business 208n21; of departure and separation 163; of erasure and destruction 163; of fabrication of iconicity 169; of immediate futures 166; socio- 46. See also rationality; reason London 143–144, 147, 220, 231n10 Luanda 27, 159–177, 178n9, 285n4, 291, 302; Dubaiization of 27, 163, 165, 296; modern 164; New 27, 162, 165 made-up 3, 5–6, 240 Mager, Anne 138, 296 Maggie, Yvonne 43–44 magic 116, 128, 223, 250; contagious 278; laws against 81. See also museum, Black Magic Magistério Indigena 48, 52–53, 55, 64, 66 Makhanya, Mondli 136, 139, 146, 151

326 Index

marginalization 21, 81–82, 117, 118, 121; economic 82 Margry, Jan 267, 271–273, 275 Markelo, Marian 29, 250–251, 257–259 market(s) 8, 28, 79, 84, 85, 92, 93, 127, 151, 172, 183, 186, 191–192, 203, 204, 206, 213, 222, 228–229; acarajé 92; African 227, 228; art 3, 28, 212, 226, 229; capitalist 137; craft 212, 214, 220; entertainment 190; food 78; free 91, 137; global/globalized 31n16, 205; identity 205; Kinaxixi Square 161–162; labour 8; media 192; popular 81, 83; religious 95; tourist 48–49 market forces 191, 230 marketing 191, 194, 202, 205, 227, 306 marketplace; of cultural authenticity 206 market reserve 92–93, 95, 102 maroon(s) 119, 129, 132n10. See also quilombo Marschall, Sabine 139, 150, 153n2 Marx, Karl 20, 148, 177n2 Mary, Virgin 4, 60 mask(s) 29, 217, 219, 230n3, 239–240, 252–260, 262n24, 302; African 258, 302; ancestor 238, 250, 252, 255, 257–258, 302; anthropomorphic 252; Egun 257; Fang 192; generic 257; Kabra 29, 250, 252–253, 255, 259; replica 252; wooden 251, 256, 258; West African 256, 258; Yoruba 29, 251–252 masquerade 82, 252; Senegalese 205; Senegambian Kankurang 9 Masters and the Slaves, The 112 Matalawê, Jerry 53–55, 57–59, 64, 67 material(s) 5, 7, 12, 13, 15, 18, 22, 23, 27, 29, 31n15, 47, 54, 58, 67, 69n5, 76, 79, 87, 91–92, 98–100, 109, 113, 115, 117–118, 121, 126, 128–130, 132n9, 137–139, 142, 147, 158–161, 165–166, 174, 177, 184, 215, 220, 231n11, 237–239, 244, 245, 250–252, 255–256, 258–259, 262n19, 266–274, 276, 281–284, 285n1, 292, 295, 296, 302, 303, 307–308; archival 152;

commemorative 266, 270–271, 273, 275–276, 283, 285n3; controversial 276; cultural 151, 292; ethnographic source 272; Fortuyn 272, 276; heritage 151; memorial 274; phonographic and photographic 111; promotional 154n8; PR 192; preserved 270; sacred 208n14; sensitive 277; Theo van Gogh 270; working 201. See also immaterial materiality/ies 16, 26, 69n5, 83, 113, 128–131, 165–166, 238–240, 245, 249–250, 267, 281, 283–284, 291, 302; Candomblé originated 99 materialization 143, 146, 169, 174, 177, 222, 303 material presence 238–239, 250, 260, 281 Mazzarella, William 1, 16 meaning(s) 8, 54, 56–57, 70n20, 99, 110, 113, 117, 119, 129, 165–166, 193, 214, 221, 222, 228, 245, 249, 267, 281, 292–293, 297, 301, 309; African 293; alternative 229; global 28; historical 281; religious 118; sacred 130; symbolic 268, 280; world(s) of 8, 57 meaning-making 130 media 8, 16, 24, 27, 43, 90, 112, 137, 139, 147, 149–152, 153n1, 182, 184, 190–193, 195, 204, 208n18, 221, 224, 228, 241, 244, 250, 282, 304; audiovisual 137, 183; commercial 183, 185; dominant 19; global 191, 193, 205; Ghanaian 186; iconic 302; mass 43, 84, 184, 190–191; marketdriven 186; material 79; new -scapes 167 mediation(s) 16, 21, 22, 153n2, 184, 208n19; of heritage 150; of the past 137; religious 22; sensuous 67 Meertens Institute 271, 273 melting pot 82, 109, 111 memorial(s) 7, 98, 100, 119, 136, 139–140, 143–147, 152, 249, 266–274, 284n1, 285n6; artistic 146; Brenda Fassie 146; Columbine High School 274; narrative 140, 150; National Canadian Liberation,

Index 327

Apeldoorn 269, 285n8; National Slavery, Amsterdam 243–245; public art 26; STHP (Sunday Times Heritage Project) 146 memory 9, 41, 50, 126, 140, 144, 150, 154n8, 162, 176, 186, 207n6, 214, 270, 308, 309; bone 13, 27; collective 8, 220; colonial 243; culinary 79; cultural 204, 220; future 29, 266; historical 52; places of 159; public 147; social 1 Mensah, Ata 200, 202 mestiçagem 82, 87 metaphor 119, 128, 159, 177, 218, 228, 249, 292, 295 metaphysics 4–5 Middle Passage 250, 256–259 Milano, Dante 116, 118 mimesis 16, 44, 48, 68 Minas Gerais 49, 66, 113–114, 127, 131n2 Minckley, Gary 137, 308–309, 310n1 Mingas, Ângela 161–162 Mission of Folklore Research (Missão de Pesquisas Folclóricas) 111, 117 MNU (Unified Black Movement, Brazil) 119, 130 modernity 14, 21, 42, 116, 187; African 217, 219; Ghanaian 212, 222; narratives of 308; tradition and 110; Western 187, 207n5, 261n3 modernization 87 montage 67; anthropological 88 Montero, Paula 121, 124 monument(s) 11, 15, 27, 31n11, 98, 115, 129, 143, 152, 153n4, 159–161, 163, 166, 184, 216, 240–244, 247, 249, 294, 301; ancient 9; baroque 122; Catholic 161; civil 161; heritage 301; National 48; Nazi- 242; Orisha 92; Queen Wilhelmina 269; Voortrekkers 23 monumentality 113, 128, 137, 139, 144, 153n7, 215, 222, 271 mourning 268, 297 movement(s) 52, 57, 62, 163, 170, 172, 174, 175, 177, 178n10, 189, 202, 239, 272; Arts and Crafts 221; avant-garde 110, 111; black 26, 77,

88, 112, 119, 120, 130, 132n11, 132n14; Christian and non-Christian 172; civil 119; global and historical 230; identitarian 19; international 215; modernist 110, 111; Mpeve ya Nlongo (Holy Spirit) 171; of citizen activism 162; of conventionalization 62; of cultural canonization 47, 54; of ethnogenesis 70n7; of rupture and secession 176; of urbanization 50; Pentecostal-Charismatic 9; religious 170; Romantic 14 (see also Romanticism); social 8; Social Realism 222; Surinamese labour 240, 242; Tropicália 123 Mpeve ya Nlongo (Holy Spirit) 171–172, 174 MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) 177n2 murals 10, 85 multiculturalism 8, 76, 87, 89, 100, 112, 119, 245 Murray, Susan 184–185 Musee d l’Homme, Paris 220 Museu Coronel David Carneiro, Paraná 115 Museu da Moeda (Museum of Coins), Luanda 161 Museu das Forças Armadas (Armed Forces Museum), Luanda 160 Museu de Antropologia (Museum of Anthropology), Luanda 160 Museu de Magia Negra (Museum of Black Magic), Rio de Janeiro 115–118 Museu Eugênio Teixeira Leal 2 Museu Paraense, Paraná 115 Museu Paraense Emilio Gold, Pará 115 museum(s) 3, 7, 10, 12–13, 29, 85, 90, 115, 118–119, 130, 138, 149, 152, 160, 184, 215, 225, 228, 240, 251, 254–255, 257, 262n22, 266, 269, 270, 277–279, 281–282, 285n9, 293, 302, 309; archeological 10; beer 296; Dutch 29, 251; ethnographic 118, 119–220; European 219–220; memorial 119; national 7, 281; news 150. See also newseum Museum, Africa, Berg an Dal 29, 251

328 Index

Museum, Amsterdam 254–255, 270 Museum, Black Magic, Rio de Janeiro 115–118 Museum, Civil Police Academy, Rio de Janeiro 115–118, 293 Museum, CODA, Apeldoorn 276, 282–283 Museum, Dutch Police 276, 282–283, 286n29 Museum, National, Amsterdam (RIjksmuseum) 270, 272, 277, 280, 282–283, 285n16 Museum, Smithsonian National, of American History 274 Museum, Stedelijk, Amsterdam 225, 231n15 &16 Museum, Workers, Johannesburg 154n9 music 54, 82, 85, 127, 130, 145, 172, 182, 188, 188, 189, 190, 194, 196, 202, 204, 206, 207n10; Ga 195196; highlife 187; popular 50, 53; traditional 191, 196 musical instrument(s) 127, 131, 215–216 musician(s) 82, 83, 190, 196, 200, 202; northern (Ghana) 219 musseques 27, 162, 172, 176, 178n9 Muslim 9–11, 227; former 285n12. See also Islam myth-making 13, 307 narrative(s) 3, 10, 16, 17, 23, 26, 78, 81, 88, 139–141, 144, 148, 150, 152, 158, 183, 184, 202–204, 225, 227, 256, 258, 269, 281, 283, 300, 304, 308–309; corporate capitalist 138; counter- 27; cultural 203, 300; founding 48, 242; grand 21, 140; heritage 27, 137, 139, 152–153, 158, 201; historical 10, 27, 138, 152, 208n14; master 202, 244, 250, 258; meta- 20; mythological 79; national 109, 112, 113, 137, 152, 284; newsworthy 137; of modernity 308; of affect 309; personal 304; public 27, 139; self- 302; standard 80; subcultural 146

National Commission on Culture, Ghana 188, 207n6, 214, 231n12 nation-building 1 nationalism 9, 19, 33n28, 82, 152, 183, 186, 188, 190, 204, 213, 229, 237; African 215; Afrikaner 23; cultural 207 nature 59, 76, 127, 303–304; second 23 Netherlands 2, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 29, 31n13, 236, 238, 242–244, 249, 250, 254, 258, 259, 266, 268, 274, 278, 285n8, 286; African heritage in the; gin from the 193; history of the 272; south of the 228; Winti religion in the 302 newseum 149, 152 Newtown, Johannesburg 144–145 New York 218, 274, 285n7, NGO(s) (Non-governmental organizations) 8, 130; Anaí 52; Trivos Jovens 51 Nikolai Pavlovich Institute of Fine Art, Sofia 222 Nigeria 9, 79, 227, 252 Nkrumah, President Kwame 186, 188–189, 195, 204, 207n2, n3, n4, 216, 221–222, 229, 231n12 nominalism 75–76 Northern Ireland 9, 153n6 object(s) 7, 8, 10, 12–13, 16, 18, 22–23, 29, 58, 75–76, 99–100, 113, 115–119, 128, 130–131, 132n6, n9, 166, 174, 177, 184, 190, 207n1, 212, 214–218, 220, 221, 224–225, 227–230, 231n7, 236–240, 244, 248, 251–257, 260, 267–270, 272, 275–284, 285n16, 286n25, n29, 291–296, 300–304, 310; African 115, 220, 229; art 167; boundary 78, 98–100, 102, 291–294, 297; Candomblé 115–119, 130–131, 132n9, 292–293; Catholic 278; circulation of 221; commemorative 269, 271, 274, 281, 285n3, n16; confiscated 117; controversial 269, 277 (see also objects of controversy, objects of contention, objects of dispute); crime-related 282; cultic

Index 329

115, 132n9; cultural 14, 26, 225, 228, 239, 296; devaluation and deconstruction of 217; donated 220; fetish 224; frontier 293; fugitive 293; heritage 14–16, 18, 222, 237, 240, 260 293, 303, 306; historical 218, 269, 278; history of the 227; iconic 236, 238–240, 244, 249–250, 254, 256–257, 260; inanimate 244, 249; in the making 255; in the world 20; lethal 269, 276–277, 279, 283; marginalized 118; material 58, 128, 131, 208n14, 215, 220, 238, 252, 255, 267, 283, museum 277, of contention 160, 165, of controversy 99, of dispute 169, 177, of questioning 224–225, 294, powerful 222, 227, religious 77, 118, 239, 253, 254, 267; ritual 292–293; sacred 123, 276; sensational 269, 283; spiritual 224, 251; subject and 14, 18, 77, 163, 220, 261n9; traditional 223; world of 14, 18, 261n9. See also artefact; thing objectification 9, 20, 58, 71n24, 187, 190, 215, 229, 304 Offei-Nyako, Benjamin 222, 229, 231n13 O Globo newspaper 43, 70n9, n11 Omanye Aba Show 182–183, 186, 190, 193–197, 199, 202–205 ontology/ies 4, 19, 25, 31n3, 46, 68, 70n16 & 17, 71n30, 304 oratory 23–24, 33n29. See also rhetoric Orisha(s) 79–80, 88, 90, 92, 100, 103n2, n3 Orlando Pirates Football Club, Soweto 146 orthodoxy 123–125, 170 Osu, Ghana 183, 195, 208n13, 214 palace(s) 201; chiefs’, Ghana 28, 182, 201, 208n14; Iron, Luanda 160; of Ana Joaquina, Luanda 161 Palacia de Ferro (Iron Palace), Luanda 160 Palanca, 27, 171, 172, 174, 175, 178n9; Republic of 27

Pan-Africanism 186, 207n2, 217, 221, 224, 229 Panyin, Osagyefuo Amoatia Ofori 199 paradox(es) 25, 45, 102, 103, 184, 187, 208n20, 214, 239, 284 Paramaribo 239, 242 Paris 117, 127, 220, 285n1 Paris of Africa 161 participation 46, 51, 59, 64, 66, 71n29, 77, 90, 165, 174, 178n8, 197, 200, 226, 296, 302; audience 193; political 109, 112; public 148 past(s)1, 2, 4, 6–8, 12, 13, 17, 22–24, 28, 29, 41, 45, 53, 54, 69, 102, 103n2, 136, 148–150, 152, 158, 163, 166, 170, 177, 183, 184, 190, 203, 204, 214, 218, 229, 239, 269, 281, 282, 284, 286n26, 292, 294–296, 299; African 218, 221, 224, 230, 231n10, 255, 256, 258, 259, 307–309; ancestral 25, 47, 205; and future 69, 177, 295; as heritage 32; Christian 31n13; colonial 25, 111, 243; cultural 188, 206, 223; glorious 219; painful 302; precolonial 187, 203, 207n1, 212, 217, 222; shared 221, 236; timeless 220; tribal 201; violent 283 Pataxó 2–5, 25, 41–69, 70n13, 71n24, 292, 294–296 perception(s) 20–22, 68, 138, 141, 185, 186, 198, 277; collective 112; direct, of reality 300; modes of 221; negative 17; public 154n10; self261n3; sensory 21; sensuous 22 performance(s) 4, 10, 13, 28, 49, 83, 131, 144, 170, 183, 185–186, 189–191, 194, 196, 198–202, 205, 216, 220, 225, 229, 297, 302, 307–309; cultural 214; heritage 190; interpretive 300; mediatized 10, 208n19; public art 295; ritual 125, 128; spicy 205; staged 216; stylized 186, 190; theatrical 253; touristic 71n24 persecution 123, 170, 178n8 persuasion 20, 23–24, 33n29, 167, 169, 177, 206, 249–250, 260, 302, 306; aesthetics of 1, 6, 16, 19, 20, 23–24,

330 Index

persuasion (cont.) 58, 69n5, 165, 183, 202, 239, 250, 260, 301; rhetorical 24; self-23 pervasion 23–24, 33n28 phantasmagoria(s) 163–164, 296 phenomenology 21, 301, 302 philanthropy 137–138, 146–147, 152, 153n6, 154n11 Picasso 221–223 piercing(s) 25, 57, 68 pistol 29, 276–277, 281–283, 293 place(s) 1, 8, 15, 48, 49, 51, 86, 87, 88, 90, 109, 113, 120, 127, 130, 131, 132n6, 146, 152, 174, 191, 194, 203, 223, 225, 231n12, 237, 245, 247, 266, 283, 286n24, 301, 302, 304; heritage 190, 309; of media power 195; of memory 159; of mischief 281; of no history 164; of public history 148; secular 269; social 293; spirit of the 303; spiritual 247; structural 78 Places of Remembrance 142–143 plaque(s) 144, 146, 243, 245; blue 142–143 poet(s) 82; modernist 116 police 81, 82, 96, 115–118, 122, 132n8, 293; mounted 243; policy 69n7, 96, 231n12; cultural 111, 188, 207n6; dress 192; housing 178n6; neo-liberal 183; public 2; state 9; UNESCO 15. See also museum, Civil Police; museum, Dutch Police policymakers 99 politician(s) 29, 82, 85, 95, 130, 141, 230n6, 248, 261, 268; Dutch 285n12; evangelical 90, 93; exiled opposition 119; mainstream 19; racist 10 politics 1, 22, 90, 95, 123, 140, 146, 170, 177, 257, 278; Brazilian 112; cultural 26, 87, 109–110, 124, 216, 258–259; heritage 8, 32n19, 45, 48, 101–102, 109, 184, 186, 190, 243, 259, 308; identity 25, 46, 68, 158, 186, 244; institutional 7; micro 174; of appearance and recognition 205; of authentication; 1, 6, 13, 24, 29, 68, 89, 96, 124–125, 239, 240, 250,

260, 301, 306; of cathedrals 167, 174; of indigenous authenticity 44; of persuasion 167;of representation 112, 129; of the past 307; of visual display 166, 172; of world-making 2; partisan 170; traditional 208; transnational 159 polyurethane 29, 252–255, 258 populism 19, 110, 140–141, 236 postcolonialism 118, 184, 187, 188, 204, 213, 215, 217, 219 power(s) 20, 22, 44–45, 54, 67, 118, 140, 186, 188, 206, 222, 224, 230n1, 239, 269, 278, 306, 308–309; aesthetic 67–68, 183, 190; affective 186, 188, 189–190, 206; ancestral 199; creative 110; dynastical 278; emotional 267; Foucauldian understanding of 67; heritage 12, 306; hydroelectric 43; knowledge and 308–309; media 186, 195, 204; mystical 200; natural 196; of chieftaincy 198; of spirits 199–200, 206; of the market 204; of the past 206, 214; of tradition 202, 205; oratory 23; persuasive 68, 269, 278; political 307; regulatory 78, 93, 94, 102; religious 201, 240; sovereign 100; spiritual 224, 229; state 78, 100, 204, 222; structures of 22, 227–228; symbolic 116, 137; transcendental 118, 268; world-making 24; power constellations 6, 240, 278; power relations 68, 87, 150 practice(s) 1, 3, 7, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 26, 77, 85, 89, 91, 96, 103, 117, 129, 184, 204, 207n1, 216, 222, 228, 229, 230n7, 297, 299, 302, 306; Afro-Brazilian 129; artistic 116, 215; Brazilian 130; common 266; corporeal 128; cultural 109, 111, 114, 120, 124, 300, 304; daily 71n24; educational 131; everyday 70n16, 88, 100; hard 185; healing 171; heritage 15, 165, 186, 214, 309–310; excavation 9; journalistic 139; local 213; memory 150; mimetic 25; mystical 18; national 214; news 27, 136; non-native 57; of bodily

Index 331

adornment 45, 68; of body-shaping 46; of copying 262n23; of history 307–308; of mediation 22, 152n2; of worship 267; performance 189; political 240; religious 22, 118, 122, 125–126, 238, 292, 301; ritual 51, 70n16, 123, 268; social 127; Winti 250, 255 Prampram, Ghana 183, 205, 208n13 prayer(s) 97, 98, 172, 175, 176, 193, 201 prejudice 59, 100, 222; racial 219 (see also racism) presence 4, 49, 50, 82, 130, 239, 249, 250–253, 256, 259–260, 269, 285n6, 295; African 79; brand 152; dangerous 200, 293; divine 22, 118, 256; iconic 238–239; material 238–239, 250, 260, 281; of Islam in Europe 9; of the acaragé 78; of scaffolding 159, 165, 177; of the past 6, 22; of the transcendental 118, 267; of tourists 71n24; spiritual 199–200, 206, 251; symbolic 238 prestige 125, 213; academic 13; lack of 128; social and cultural 119 Pretoria 23, 154n7 priest(s) 219; Candomblé 80, 90, 121; male and female 90, 200 priestess(es) 200; Winti 29, 250, 257 primitivism 82, 221 production(s) 6, 85, 86, 92, 127, 217, 221, 227, 229, 237; architectural 303; black 121; commercial 28, 185; cultural 6, 15, 22, 303; heritage 1, 7, 8, 29, 159, 160, 205, 206, 239, 291, 292, 294, 306; knowledge 20, 147, 308; literary 112; material 121; media 142, 191; metacultural 184; music 191; of community 167; of exotic body images 208n17; of meaning 267; of presence 252; of temporalities 166; of the future 296; of the past as heritage 32n19; of the real 1, 6, 15, 22; patrimonial 299; sensorial 165; TV 183–185, 191, 197, 293 professionalization 190 proselytism 85, 89, 167

pseudo-rituals 226 psychologist(s) 82, 301 psychology 21, 24, 301–303 purity 124, 126, 184, 187, 208n20, 222; African 125; cultural 84, 217; ethnic 204 Queen, Dutch 29, 243, 248, 269, 276, 285n8 Queen’s Day 29, 268–269, 276, 282 quilombo(s) 2, 119–120, 132n10. See also maroon race 13, 78, 79, 100, 109, 110, 121, 138, 153n3 racism 9, 10, 87, 88, 90, 112, 117, 141, 145, 219, 242, 247; colonial 247 radio 24, 77, 148, 149, 196; Catholic, of Angola 161; Obonu FM, Ghana 194 rainforest 70n8; Atlantic 50 Ramos, Arthur 82, 122, 123 Rationalism, Enlightenment 32n23, 300 rationality 14, 20, 23, 208n15, 257, 261n9. See also reason; irrationality rationalization 21, 32n23, 113 real 1–2, 4–6, 11, 15, 19, 22, 90, 109, 117, 120, 123, 130, 164, 214, 218–220, 237–238, 249–250, 291, 306; medial constructions of the 19 reality/ies 20, 27–28, 76, 88, 159, 182, 186, 252, 300, 308, 309; experienced 158; fake 112. See also corpo-reality reality show 196 reality television 206 reason 14, 20, 32n23. See also rationality Reckwitz, Andreas 20–21, 32n23, n24 recognition 3, 9, 11, 16, 17, 18, 25, 41, 54, 77, 86, 95, 99, 100, 101, 114, 117, 118, 119, 121, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 160, 167, 169, 170, 172, 174, 204, 229, 231n7, 236, 242, 261n2, 280, 285n7, 292, 296; as canonic 26, 123; as heritage 23, 26, 111, 112–113, 124, 303; as world heritage 15, 161; institutional 57, 70n14; national 243; of cultural relativism 15; politics of 205;

332 Index

recognition (cont.) public 91, 149; official 23, 87, 172, 174, 178n11; state 9, 87–88, 122; reconstruction 11, 14, 17, 22, 169, 174, 279, 296; authentic 31n18; Post-war 143; social 170 redemocratization 87, 119 re-enchantment 9, 85, 99, 205. See also enchantment; disenchantment reflection 11, 18, 100, 164, 220 regime(s) 21, 23, 111, 162, 164–165, 172, 178n3, 221, 222; aestheticpolitical 22–24; Angolan 163; colonial 170, 187, 242; democratic 222; heritage 15; military 188, 222, 242, 244; of sensitivity/sensibility 67, 310; of value 93, 204–205; political 81; sociopolitical 57 Reijnders, Carin 276, 277, 282 relativism; and universalism 300; anthropological 5; cultural 15, 300 religion(s) 1, 32, 70n8, 70n20, 75, 76, 81, 84, 88, 91, 92, 93, 97, 101, 118, 125, 128, 160, 166, 236, 238; AfroBrazilian 25, 76, 85, 90, 115, 124, 125, 131; culture and 43, 118, 255; ethnic 91; freedom of 100; art and 257, 292; heritage and 76, 81, 93, 160, 238, 255; material 100; public 75; study of 267, 307; traditional 193, 201, 224; Winti 29, 238, 250, 251, 257, 302; Yoruba 79 religiosity 89, 91–93, 95, 113, 127–128 Renaissance; African 222, 251 reparation 87–88, 94, 100, 245 repatriation; of human remains 8 representation(s) 19, 75, 80, 95, 100, 104n6, 112, 124, 130, 206, 231n7, 238, 247, 249, 261n2, 303, 310; archetypal 94; common sense 112; counter-hegemonic 112; cultural 138; graphic 295; idealistic 221; media 184; mimetic 83; naturalistic 249; of Africa 120; of colonial rule 215; of the baiana 88; politics of 112, 129; self- 93, 112; social 303; stereotypical 219 representational economy 57, 68, 82 representationalism 302

repression 81, 141 research 2, 7, 22, 28, 30n1, 31n13, 53, 55, 126, 128, 153, 167, 198, 199, 201, 204, 208n19, 212, 217, 271, 273, 304, 309, 310; and development 147; empirical 1; ethnographic 2; historical and genealogical 238, 257, 266; on frontier situations 293; on mental pathologies 118; scientific 13 research institutes/institutions 8, 269 resistance 76, 82, 119–120, 221, 224, 242, 248, 309; anti-colonialist 170; black 88, 244; female 88 resonance 19, 130, 203, 300; emotional 309; experiental 14 resource(s) 1, 6, 28, 44, 55, 82, 113, 120, 141, 199, 205, 229, 231n12, 292; heritage 137, 151, 222; historical 150; knowledge 147–148; pedagogic 115; public 90; sacralized 218; scholarly 154n12 rhetoric 23–24, 33n29, 90, 96, 131n2, 138, 158, 243, 244, 249, 299. See also oratory rhythm(s) 53, 189, 189–190, 301, 202, 204, 206; traditional 196 rights 31n4, 87, 102, 109, 121; civil 245, 262n25; collective 119, 131n3; cultural 109, 119, 129; gay 236; human 12, 147, 153n6, 154n11, 261n6; indigenous 45; individual 119; political 109, 119, 131n3; minority 90; property 127, 131n3; social 109, 119, 121; women’s 236 Rijksmuseum 270, 272, 277, 280, 282–283, 285n16 Rio de Janeiro 42, 43, 83, 95, 115, 117, 120, 127, 129, 132n5, n7 Rita 93–96, 101–102, 303 ritual(s), 12, 13, 46, 48, 50, 51–53, 70n16, 71n24, 79, 80, 85, 88–89, 97, 123–128, 130, 132n9, 165, 172, 176, 182, 188, 193, 198, 199, 200, 215, 218, 251, 268, 276, 283, 285n2, 292–293, 300, 301–302; Candomblé 128; collective 267–268; commemorative 267–268, 283; of the Waters 56, 64, 66; Ouricuri 51; Pataxó 53; pseudo- 226; purification

Index 333

257; religious 7, 260; sacred 51; Toré 46; traditional 193, 268; Winti 254; Yaokwa 130. See also pseudo-rituals Rodrigues, Nina 116, 117, 123 Romanticism 5, 14–15, 32n23, 83, 140, 207n2, 259 Rowlands, Michael 931n5, 102, 172, 184, 213, 214 royal funeral rites 28, 182–183, 199 SAHA (South African History Archive) 148, 150, 152, 154n11, n12 Salvador de Bahia 2, 7, 77–95, 100–101, 104n6, 114, 122, 129–130, 303 samba 83, 95, 98, 127 Sankofa 188, 191, 212–214, 218, 220, 222, 227–229, 300 Sankofaism 9, 188, 191–193, 205, 207n11, 213–214, 230, 296 Sansi, Roger 85, 101, 174 Sao Paulo 51, 111, 120, 127 scaffold(s)/scaffolding 27, 57, 159–160, 165–166, 174–175, 177, 279, 280, 285n4, 291–292, 294–296; aesthetics of 165; legal 295; social 304 Schöneberg, Berlin 142–144 Schramm, Katharina 31n5, 76, 183, 188, 213–214, 237 sculptor(s) 114, 145, 216, 219; African 224; Ghanaian 231n10 sculptural idiom 118–119 sculpture(s) 10, 117, 123, 146, 212, 216–217, 219–221, 223–225, 245, 247, 250–252, 255; anthropomorphic 218; African 217–218, 220–221, 223, 229, 231n10, 251; bronze 145, 225; Cathollic 113; ceramic 251; ebony 219; ritual 218; soapstone 114; wooden 114, 224 secularism 103, 238 secularity 76, 90–91, 118, 238, 240, 253, 257, 269, 278 secularization 31n13, 77, 81, 85 secular relics 29, 278–279, 286n25 secular sacred 238 Segal, Lauren 147–150, 154n8 self 16, 203, 219, 221; African 215; authentic 16; lost 220; world and 14, 18 self-assurance 30n1

self-cultivation 32n23 self-definition 190, 205 self-delight 22 self-esteem 205 self-funding 136 selfhood 184; African 186–187 self-interest 27 self-making 16, 25 self-narratives 302 self-perception 261n3 self-persuasion 23–24 self-presentation 86, 100, 203 self-regulation 81 self-representation(s) 93, 112 self-respect 1 self-worth 203 sensation(s) 14, 18, 20–21, 165, 185, 253, 267; bodily 206; historical 239, 278; religious 130; shared 16, 20 sensational forms 22, 118, 267–269, 283–284, 306 sensationalism 136, 185, 189 sense 3, 5, 6, 12, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 47, 54, 58, 59, 67, 68, 75, 76, 84, 87, 91, 97, 102, 112, 113, 120, 128, 131n2, 131n3, 139, 148, 165, 167, 169, 170, 187, 188, 189, 199, 203, 205, 206, 208n21, 215, 236, 237, 239, 249, 250, 254, 257, 258, 267, 276, 281, 306; and essence 291; common 21, 112, 120; embodied 227; semiotic 238; symbolic 249; technical 261; of authenticity 16, 20, 148, 149, 203, 281; of beauty or terror 267; of belonging 227; of crisis 268; of disciplinary hierarchies 307; of essence 16, 23, 204; of feeling 203; of inferiority 246; of justice and vulnerability 249; of movement and event 175; of past 170, 269; of sacralization 169; of touch 208n18; of truth and authenticity 239 sense-making 309 senses 16, 19, 20, 21–25, 28, 32n27, 67, 69n5, 142, 153, 167, 185, 186, 206, 208n18, 239, 255, 284; or authenticity 197; of tradition and transcendence 169

334 Index

sensorial modes 20 sensorium 4, 165 shaman(s) 44–45, 51 shamanism 46, 60 shipwreck(s) 7, 15 singing 103n1, 125, 128, 130; polyphonic 7 Sisterhood of Our Lady of Good Death 114 skill(s) 5, 53, 185, 231n7; olfactory 202; technical 229, 231n8. See also enskillment skirt(s); grass 4; flared 86; straw 51, 57; traditional 93 slave(s) 17, 78, 97, 112, 117, 120, 132n10, 242, 244; escaped 2; female 97, 114; freed 80, 114. See also escravo de ganho slave masters 241 slavery 10, 17, 238, 241–242, 250–251, 258–259; abolition of 81, 120, 228, 242, 258; commemoration of 238; New World 237; plantation 243, 259 slavery memorial 243–245 slave rebellion(s) 119 slave trade 8, 10, 138, 213, 228; Dutch 243; transatlantic 77–78, 237 sociality; Brazilian 95; red-hot 165; society/ies 18, 88, 121, 140, 150, 216, 217, 257, 266–268, 293; aesthetics and 20; Brazilian 70n7, 110, 116–117, 126; civil 77, 119, 161; colonial 114; Dutch 29, 236, 268; Ga 198, 208n16; indigenous 68; modern 14, 20, 32n23; multicultural 8; multi-ethnic 30n1; multireligious 8, 30n1; national 30n1, 42, 49, 57, 68, 81; plural/pluralist/pluralistic 6, 8, 110; post-enlightenment bourgeois 32n23; post-socialist 10; Western 30n1 societies, mission 217, 224 soul 12, 14, 20, 44, 110, 191, 199 South Africa 2, 9, 10, 26–27, 136–143, 146–153, 153n3, 153n6, 154n12, 13, 296, 306–309 sovereignty 100, 308; popular 121 space(s) 7, 12, 22, 27, 50, 58, 71n24, 140, 165, 167, 175–176, 205, 214,

261n3, 299, 301; active 171; cultural 71n24, 231n7; dark 103; digital 150; global 205; exhibition 191; heritage 136; interactional 99; intercultural 293; memorial 269; national 195, 205; public 159–160, 167, 214, 225; religious 174; ritualized 165; sacralized 129, 159; shared 117; urban 10, 158, 164–165, 174, 291. See also place spectacle 28, 185, 189, 213, 258, 309 SPHAN (National Historical and Artistic Heritage Service, Brazil) 110, 113. See also IPHAN sponsorship 28, 160, 166, 183, 190, 193, 203, 231n11; commercial 138; corporate 138, 191; governmental 159, 162, 164–165, 170; state 100, 190, 216, 217 Star, Susan Leigh 78, 99, 291–292 stakeholder(s) 2, 146, 152–153 state(s) 3, 7–12, 26, 45, 48, 57, 70n7, 70n14, 77–78, 81–88, 90–91, 94, 98, 100, 102, 111, 117–118, 122, 126, 131, 137, 139–141, 152–153, 160–161, 170, 172, 178n2, 183–184, 188–191, 193, 203–205, 213–217, 221–222, 227, 229–230, 237, 279, 295, 309; Alagoas 120; Amapá 127; Amazonian, of Pará 115; Angolan 166; Bahia 25, 77, 124, 132n14; Brazilian 45, 109–110, 131n3; commemorative 309; Dutch 11, 244, 281; Ghanaian 183, 186, 189–190; Islamic 10; Kentucky 17; Maranhão; Maroon, of Palmares 129; Minas Gerais 49; nation 7, 45, 109, 183, 188, 213, 216, 281, 301, 308; postindependence 216; Venezualan 71n30; Virginia 10 statue(s) 85, 88, 118, 129–130, 238, 240, 249, 280; Agostinho Neto 161; ancient 10; Anton de Kom 29, 240–250, 255, 257–260, 261n10, n11, 296; Bible Square 101; Brenda Fassie 145; Buddha 9; Cecil Rhodes 10; fertility 212, 216; golden lion 302; Mama Aisa 255; Mister Wibaut 248; Orisha 92, 100–101; Pim

Index 335

Fortuyn 270; Queen Wilhelmina 248; Sankofa 300; Zumbi 129–130 stereotype(s) 15, 219, 229 STHP (Sunday Times Heritage Project) 26–27, 136–153, 154n9, n11, 292, 295 Stoler, Ann Laura 165–166 Stolpersteine project 143 stool(s) 145, 215, 223; Akan 225; black 198, 208n14 Stool House(s) 197–198, 203, 208n14 style(s) 23, 24, 28, 62, 71n26, 76, 158, 183, 192, 205, 220, 248–249, 257–258, 295, 33n29; academic 66; aesthetic 52, 57; African 191, 223; architectural 51; art 28, 215, 217, 220, 222–224, 229, 231n14; baroque 113, 166; body paint 59, 61–62, 64, 68; dress 83, 97; hair 60; heritage 46; leadership 169; musical 188; neoclassical 167; painting 217; reporting 136; rhetorical 90; tropical modernist 167; walking 83; Western 191, 201. See also lifestyle Sunday Times (South Africa) 26–27, 136–153, 154n10, n11, 292, 295–296. See also STHP Surrealism 116 surveillance 81, 96, 120 sword(s) 219, 246, 277, 280 symbol(s) 55, 62, 84, 88, 91, 124, 207n7, 214, 216–217, 229, 238, 258, 259, 294; Adinkra 212, 216, 223, 230n1, n2; Akan Sankofa 188, 213; cultural 236; iconic 99; identity 124; local 123; material 132n9; national 123, 216; political 137; precolonial 212; Txôpai’s 56 symbol bank 82, 99, 123, 292 symbolic economy of alterity 57, 294 symbolism 18–19, 44, 46, 48, 56, 57, 58, 68, 77, 88, 98, 112, 116, 118, 120, 122, 124, 137, 159, 169, 174, 190, 201, 207n11, 213, 227, 230n3, 237, 238, 249, 268, 283, 301; floral 285n5; state 189 symbolization 62

talent show(s) 27, 183–185, 192–194, 203–205 taste(s), 79, 83, 101, 113, 116, 152, 192, 297, 301; local 227; of Africa in Brazil 89; popular 27 Taussig, Michael 5, 16, 41, 44, 49, 67, 71n31 technique(s) 5, 33n28, 79; body painting 59; construction 113; cooking 83, 101; culinary 77; embroidery 7; religious 79; rhetorical 23 technology 70n8, 149, 255–256-257; cell-phone 28; 3D 252 television 16, 24, 28, 182–186, 188, 193, 201–206, 208n19, 253, 269; commercial 184, 185, 190, 203; heritage 293; reality 184–185, 203, 206 temple(s) 7, 26, 77, 166–167, 299; Candomblé 87, 114, 122; ICUES 175–176; neo-classical styled 167; Pentecostal 167; Tokoist 171; Twelve Elders 171; Umbanda 43. See also terreiro temporality/ies 27, 158–161, 164–166, 170, 172, 177, 258, 261n3, 304 temporalizing formations 158–159, 165 terreiro(s) 26, 77, 79–83, 87, 91–94, 99–100, 115–116, 118–119, 122–127, 129, 132n9 territoriality 45 Teshie, Ghana 182, 195–199, 205, 208n13 textiles 215, 227–228, 230n5, 255 theology; Catholic Liberation 119; Christian 171–172 theory/ies 4, 15, 20, 110, 165, 227, 300, 303, 310; aesthetic 32n23; anthropological 5; from the South 310; postmodern 21; practice 21; social 20–21; sculpture 223; traditional 201 tombamento 112, 123, 124, 127, 131n3 tourism 8, 48–49, 71n24, 82, 123, 159, 160, 189, 213 tourist(s) 24, 83, 89, 94, 130, 214, 302; diasporan 214; ignorant 303

336 Index

toy, cuddly 268–269, 273–276, 282, 297 tradition(s) 4, 9, 13, 28, 30n2, 44–46, 51, 70n16, 85, 89, 93–99, 101, 102, 110– 111, 120–121, 124, 169, 170, 182, 183, 185–187, 189, 194–200, 236, 249–250, 258, 259, 262n25, 293, 296, 303; African 124, 259, 292; AfroBrazilian 86; Akan 189; Amerindian 46; anthropological 300; British 141; culinary 84; cultural 120, 185–186, 190, 199; culturalist 45; culture and 187, 193, 219; differentiating 68; essence of 198; ethnic 183, 186–187; family 302; foreign 194; indigenous 186–187; journalistic 141; local 183–185, 190; Nagô 125; objectified 229; of invention 46, 68; oral 101, 126; performance 190; popular 86–87; religious 9, 44, 124, 176; royal 199; Saussurean 69n5; sculptural 250; shakinen sengu 101, 296; syncretic 98, 104n6 transformation(s) 28, 44–46, 54, 87, 96, 99, 109, 113, 123 124, 126, 149, 159, 162, 165, 169, 182, 190, 225, 228, 301; cultural 58; progressive 164; sociopolitical 230; symbolic 98; theological, economic and political 169 troupe(s); cultural 28, 182–183, 186, 189, 194–195, 197, 204, 208n13; theatre 207n10 truth 14, 18–19, 24, 28, 33n30, 54, 77, 84, 113, 118, 239, 260, 281; body as harbinger of 218; canons of 6, 8, 47; cultural 8, 47; embodied 120; essence and 6, 13; historical 244; photographic 249; self-evident 113; undiluted 199 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, South Africa 149 TV Africa 28, 182–183, 185, 191–196, 201, 203 unconsciousness 220 UNESCO 2, 7, 8, 12, 15, 70n23, 94, 98, 126, 127, 130, 158, 61, 213, 216, 230n7, 301, 302

union(s) 261n6; rural and factory 119; workers’ 130 United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) 220, 223, 229. See also Britain United States (of America) 31n18, 153n6; African sculptures in 221; avant-garde artists in 219; maroon communities in 132n10; southern 10 (see also South, American) urbanization 50, 110, 219, 220 value(s) 8, 9, 15, 22, 31n16, 69, 70n16, 99, 110, 113, 115, 116–117, 122, 124, 131, 152, 153n6, 184, 186–187, 193, 199, 204, 215, 217, 228, 229, 237, 267, 279, 281, 283, 293, 299, 303, 308; African 191; architectonical 122; brand 152; civic 27, 139, 152–153; commercial 138; community of 8; cultural 15, 117, 122–123, 126, 131n3, 138, 152, 204, 224, 236; democratic 12, 150; discourse of 204; economic 27, 139, 152; emotional 274–276, 283; entertainment 204–205; essential 8; ethnic 92–93, 99; expert 307; face 3, 224, 229; heritage 87–89 (see also value of heritage); historical 15, 269, 276, 281–282; material 159; moral 274, 283; museological 12; news 27, 138–140; of heritage 10, 28, 224, 229; of the past 214; political 205; regimes of 93, 204–205; religious 89, 92; sacred 276; semantic 238; social 301, 307; surplus 27, 139; universal artistic 112–113, 128; waste 276 Van Beek, Gosewijn 267, 276, 283 Van Berkum, Boris 29, 250–257, 259, 302 Van Gogh, Theo 29, 268, 270–272, 276–277, 282–284, 285n12, n16, 286n29 Van Loon, Jikke 245–247, 249, 257, 259, 261n12, 262n20 Van Oldenbarnevelt Johan 277, 279– 280 Vargas, President Getúlio 110–111 vatapá 78, 79, 83

Index 337

Venice Charter (International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites) 15 Verger, Pierre 83, 123 video 10, 62, 152, 196, 231n14 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 45, 46, 53, 57, 68, 70n20, 71n30 Voortrekkersmunument, Pretoria 23 Wagner, Roy 53, 57, 58, 62, 68 warfare 46; spiritual 85 waste 97, 251; sacred 267–268, 276, 285n2 website(s) 27, 31n7, 43, 139, 144, 148–152, 161, 270, 294 whitening 81, 111, 118, 122 windmill 11–13, 15, 237 Winti religion 29, 238, 250–252, 254–255, 257–260, 302 witchcraft 81–82, 116, 118, 172

Witz, Leslie 137, 308–309, 310n1 World Wide Web 150, 151. See also internet wood 29, 44, 48–49, 54, 55, 57–59, 62, 83, 94, 114, 131, 191, 212, 215, 223, 224, 225, 244, 245, 246, 251–254, 256, 258, 261n10, 279, 283; fire 62; hard 259, 261n10 world-making 2, 16, 19, 22, 24, 67, 110, 237 Xangô, 79; Breaking of 116 Xavante 41, 55, 57, 60 xenophobia 237, 242 Xingú National Park 55, 60–61, 70n8 Zuidoost, Amsterdam 240, 242–245, 259, 261n8 Zumbi 120, 129–130 Zwarte Piet 9