Redefining Research Methods

Trinidad Rico, Rutgers University

Challenges for post-colonial heritage and preservation training

In April of 2021, a paper at the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) argued against NAGPRA’s legal protection for Native American remains and cultural artifacts, claiming that it deprives the scientific community of certain types of research on account of religious beliefs (Wade 2021). In this way, they put religious and spiritual knowledge into conflict with scientific practice, with significant implications for the type of data and forms of authority that are involved in the work of heritage-making. One of the foundations of the critical heritage turn- or what others simply refer to as an attention to ‘heritage ethics’- has been to challenge such a “fundamentalism of the Enlightenment” (Habermas 2008: 24), whose consequences for heritage studies I discuss in Global Heritage, Religion, and Secularism (Rico 2021). Archaeologists and heritage scholars have confronted the very notion of ‘rationality’ in these fields for a long time (from Hodder 1998 to Byrne 2009), providing a productive platform for de-colonizing the study of heritage and preservation. At a theoretical level, this move forced an acknowledgement and need for political and social engagement with alternative voices that have been shaping landscapes and approaches to their study all along. At a practical level, it called for making “a place for the divinities again” (Latour 2010: 39) in the work of heritage study and preservation. 

The field of heritage studies in its various iterations has attempted to keep up with the recognition of alternative landscapes, practices, and voices in the making and re-making of heritage places and objects. The decades-long calls for bottom up and community-led study and management have resulted in significant redirections such as a ‘collaborative turn’ (Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2008:3), an ‘ethnographic turn’ (Lafrenz-Samuels 2018), and an affective turn that distinguishes between ways of seeing and ways of being (Tolia-Kelly, Waterton, and Watson 2016: 4). These avenues for growth in the field not only seek to amplify other forms of engagement with heritage stewardship but, also, call for diversifying the types of data that are used to constitute practices and traditions of heritage preservation. 

The implications of this redirection for academic and practical training in heritage and preservation are complex. While modern philosophies in heritage and preservation may advance calls for co-participatory heritage preservation to expand the diversity and influence of previously marginalized stakeholders, these approaches often remain peripheral to older methodological pillars in the study of heritage and are relegated to tight spaces within ‘official heritage.’ A cursory look at training in heritage studies suggests that the field is still driven by preservationist urgency and a corresponding technocratic know-how that channels much of the heritage economy. For example, an emphasis on 3D scanning as a mode of safeguarding pulls the field back into the core of scientism and coded expert knowledge. In the USA, this also comes in the form of a training that focuses on documentation, precision, and standards. Training that prioritizes empiricism in these ways ask to capture and translate ‘alternative’ viewpoints into scientific data sets, languages, and points of view. 

The way forward, therefore, is a lot more challenging than it appears. The work of redefining methods in heritage studies in post-colonial terms has been a work of retooling our own expertise: that is, making way to non-disciplinary -local- experts and human realities and experiences, which are not always preservationist in ethos (Meskell 2009: 4). The fostering of alternative literacies to support the future of heritage studies can be done in a transformative rather than merely additive way and through intentional disciplinary reconfigurations that embrace two interrelated interventions. First, it is necessary to underscore the distinction between different ways of seeing a heritage and seeing different heritages. Second, it is important to recognize that including new voices and letting them operate within their own ontologies are different enterprises. 

Bibliography

Byrne, Denis. 2009. Archaeology and the Fortress of Rationality. In Cosmopolitan Archaeologies, edited by Lynn Meskell, pp. 68-88. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Byrne, Denis. 2019. Prospects for a Postsecular Heritage Practice: Convergences between Posthumanism and Popular Religious Practice in Asia. Religions, 10 (7): 436. 

Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Chip and Ferguson, T. J. 2008. Introduction: The Collaborative Continuum. In Collaboration in Archaeological Practice: Engaging Descendant Communities, edited by Chris Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson, T. J., pp. 1–32. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press.

Habermas, Jürgen. 2008. Notes on Post-Secular Society. New Perspectives Quarterly 25(4): 17–29.

Hodder, Ian. 1998. Whose Rationality? A Response to Fekri Hassan, Antiquity 72(275): 213–217.

Lafrenz Samuels, Kathryn. 2018. Mobilizing Heritage: Anthropological Practice and Transnational Prospects. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Latour, Bruno. 2010. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham: Duke University Press.

Meskell, Lynn. 2009. Introduction: Cosmopolitan Heritage Ethics. In Cosmopolitan Archaeologies, edited by Lynn Meskell, pp. 1–27. Durham: Duke University Press.

Tolia-Kelly, Divya. P, Emma Waterton and Steve Watson. 2016. Introduction: Heritage, Affect and Emotion. In Heritage, Affect and Emotion, edited by Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, Emma Waterton, and Steve Watson, pp. 1–11. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

Rico, Trinidad. 2021. Global Heritage, Religion, and Secularism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wade, Lizzie. 2021. An Archaeology Society Hosted a Talk against Returning Indigenous Remains. Some Want a New Society. Science.www.sciencemag .org/news/2021/04/archaeology-society-hosted-talk-against-returning-indigen ous-remains-some-want-new. http://doi.org/10.1126/science.abj0843.

Trinidad Rico is Associate Professor and Director of Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies at Rutgers University, USA. She holds a B.A. in Archaeology from the University of Cambridge, an M.A. in Principles of Conservation from University College London, and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University. Her research explores the growth of heritage preservation culture in post-colonial contexts, with projects in Indonesia, Qatar and Argentina. Her more recent books are Global Heritage, Religion, and Secularism. Cambridge (Cambridge University Press), Methods and Methodologies in Heritage Studies (UCL Press) and The Heritage State: Religion and Preservation in Contemporary Qatar (Cornell University Press).