Foreword

Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017

“…In contrast to these accounts of a present inhabited by the past as disordered temporality, heritage work seeks to self‐consciously manage (and by extension, to order) precisely what of the past should infuse the present and to what end. The challenges of managing these projects are the subject of an American Anthropologist World Anthropologies forum on the politics and practical work of heritage making (Dominguez ; Grima ; Higueras ; Lertcharnrit ; Lilley ; Moyer, Gadsby, and Morris ; Ndoro ; Seif ; Silverman ; see also Oosterbaan ) . We also see the politics and challenges of managing heritage in Andrea Muehlebach's () account of a postindustrial Italian town's inhabitants’ efforts to make their entire town a UNESCO World Heritage Site.…”

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

“…Focusing on the connections, as well as contradictions, that characterize social spaces caught up between local and global policies and practices, this led to a powerful interdisciplinary and comparative outlook on the complexities of decoloniality. The anthropologically informed multiregional focus enabled us to explore the entanglements between place-based research, long-term practices of inhabiting and remembering, and the transnational valuations and expectations underpinning official heritage management (see Dominguez, 2017). The complexity of "authorized heritage discourse," as originally defined by Smith ( 2006), is arguably augmented in contemporary frictional spaces of developmentalism, from the widening of global extractive frontiers on natural, cultural, and intellectual materials, to the spaces into which Indigenous peoples and ethnic or rural minorities are pressured to conform to international organizations' and state-sponsored development models (e.g., Coombe and Baird, 2016;Larsen et al, 2022).The collective effort, as this dossier reveals, led to the identification of unexpected commonalities as well as new horizons for collaboration across disciplines, areas of practice, and diverse perspectives.The exchanges on heritage and decoloniality taking place across several meetings revealed a common aspiration to unpack heritage politics through their multiple historical, juridical, emotional, and spatial dimensions.…”