This article discusses the evocation of the sacred in the realm of material heritage practice, drawing on the creation of Freedom Park, a monumental, state-driven postapartheid heritage project, as a case of heritage formation. Heritage formation refers to the casting of material cultural forms as heritage through sacralizing practices that set these objects apart at the center of social relations and their maintenance as powerful registers of the past for the "hailing" of collective identities. Specifically, it shows how southern African indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) and religious concepts were appropriated, translated, and employed in the formation of three material elements at Freedom Park: the //hapo, or museum, as recounting a cosmogony of nation, the Wall of Names as generating a transcendent ancestry, and the Isivivane as focalizing a national sacred center. Overall, it serves to expand our understanding of the dynamics of heritage production in a transforming South Africa, the dynamic power and appeal of heritage as sacralized material culture, and the significance of a critical religious studies approach for interpreting the dynamism of contemporary heritage practice.
As a national site of commemoration that materially enshrined the democratic values of reconciliation and freedom, Freedom Park is South Africa’s premier post-apartheid heritage venture. Branded as a heritage destination, this complex raises questions about the relationship between practices of heritage formation and tourism. Heritage destinations are considered significant not merely as end points of tourist discovery, but also as sites that structure the practices of consumption, central to the functioning of the tourism industry. Mediating the cultural and commercial pressures that bear on visitor experience, considered the most valuable commodity in tourism economies, heritage destinations also situate meaningful experience. This article engages with how and in what ways this particular category of knowledge is mobilized around Freedom Park to legitimate the venture and shape visitor understanding of post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on ethnographic data, this article analyses how Freedom Park wielded aesthetics of persuasion, an experiential inducement, regarding the legitimacy of the site and the complex set of meanings it was meant to represent.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.