Community Based Heritage In Africa

This volume provides a powerful alternative to the Western paradigms that have governed archaeological inquiry and heritage studies in Africa. Community-based Heritage Research in Africa boldly shifts focus away from top-down community engagements, usually instigated by elite academic and heritage institutions, to examine locally initiated projects. Schmidt explores how and why local research initiatives, which are often motivated by rapid culture change caused by globalization, arose among the Haya people of western Tanzania. In particular, the trauma of HIV/AIDS resulted in the loss of elders who had performed oral traditions and rituals at sacred places, the two most recognized forms of heritage among the Haya as well as distinct alternatives to the authorized heritage discourse favored around the globe. Examining three local initiatives, Schmidt draws on his experience as an anthropologist invited to collaborate and co-produce with the Haya to provide a poignant rendering of the successes, conflicts, and failures that punctuated their participatory community research efforts. This frank appraisal privileges local voices and focuses attention on the unique and important contributions that such projects can make to the preservation of regional history. Through this blend of personalized narrative and analytical examination, the book provides fresh insights into African archaeology and heritage studies.

This volume provides new insights into the distinctive contributions that community archaeology and heritage make to the decolonization of archaeological practice. Using innovative approaches, the contributors explore important initiatives which have protected and revitalized local heritage, initiatives that involved archaeologists as co-producers rather than leaders. These case studies underline the need completely reshape archaeological practice, engaging local and indigenous communities in regular dialogue and recognizing their distinctive needs, in order to break away from the top-down power relationships that have previously characterized archaeology in Africa. Community Archaeology and Heritage in Africa reflects a determined effort to change how archaeology is taught to future generations. Through community-based participatory approaches, archaeologists and heritage professionals can benefit from shared resources and local knowledge; and by sharing decision-making with members of local communities, archaeological inquiry can enhance their way of life, ameliorate their human rights concerns, and meet their daily needs to build better futures. Exchanging traditional power structures for research design and implementation, the examples outlined in this volume demonstrate the discipline’s exciting capacity to move forward to achieve its potential as a broader, more accessible, and more inclusive field.

Communities and Cultural Heritage explores the relationship between communities, their cultural heritage and the global forces that control most of the world’s wealth and resources in today’s world. Bringing together scholars and heritage practitioners from nine countries, this book contributes to the ongoing dialogue on community heritage by analysing impediments to full community participation. The underminin of local communities comes at a high price. As the chapters in this book demonstrate, the knowledge embedded within traditional and Indigenous heritage creates communities that are more resilient to environmental and social stressors and more responsive to contemporary challenges such as climate change, environmental degradation, post-disaster recovery and relocation. Cultural heritage practices often fail to capitalise upon local knowledge and traditional skills and undervalue the potential contribution of local communities in finding creative and resourceful solutions to the issues they are confronting. Arguing that the creation of successful community heritage project requires ongoing reflection on the aims, methods, financing and acceptable outcomes of projects, the volume also demonstrates that the decolonization of Western-focussed heritage practices is an ongoing process, by which subaltern groups are brought forward and given a space in the heritage narrative. Reflecting on trends that impact communities and heritage sites across different geographical regions, Communities and Cultural Heritage will be of interest to academics, students and practitioners of cultural heritage,archaeology and anthropology around the world.

The richness of Africa’s heritage at times stands in stark contrast to the economic, health, political and societal challenges faced. Development is essential but in what forms? For whom? Following whose agendas? At what costs? This book explores how heritage can promote, secure, or undermine sustainable development with special focus on sub-Saharan Africa, and in turn, how this affects conceptions of heritage. The chapters in this volume identify shared challenges, good practices and failures, and use specific case studies to provide detailed insights into varied forms of heritage and heritage defining processes on the continent. By critically analysing the often romanticised discourses of ‘heritage’, ‘community engagement’, and ‘sustainable development’ the volume suggests ways of harnessing aspects of heritage to tackle some of the socio-economic and political pressures facing heritage practices on the continent, including the legacies of colonialism.

For a long time, resource conservationists have viewed environmental conservation as synonymous with wilderness and wildlife resources only, oblivious to the contributions made by cultural and heritage resources. However, cultural heritage resources in many parts of the developing world are gradually becoming key in social (e.g. communities’ identities and museums), economic (heritage tourism and eco-tourism), educational (curriculum development), civic (intergenerational awareness), and international resources management (e.g. UNESCO). In universities, African cultural heritage resources are facing a challenge of being brought into various academic discourses and syllabi in a rather reactive and/or haphazard approach, resulting in failure to fully address and research these resources’ conservation needs to ensure that their use in multiple platforms and by various stakeholders is sustainable. This book seeks to place African cultural heritage studies and conservation practices within an international and modern world discourse of conservation by presenting its varied themes and topics that are important for the development of the wider field of cultural heritage studies and management.

Participatory Archaeology and Heritage Studies: Perspectives from Africa provides new ways to look at and think about the practice of community archaeology and heritage studies across the globe. Long hidden from view, African experiences and experiments with participatory archaeology and heritage studies have poignant lessons to convey about local initiatives, local needs, and local perspectives among communities as diverse as an Islamic community on the edge of an ancient city in Sudan to multi-ethnic rural villages near rock art sites in South Africa. Straddling both heritage studies and archaeological practice, this volume incorporates a range of settings, from practical experiments with sustainable pottery kilns in Kenya, to an elite palace and its hidden traditional heritage in Northwestern Tanzania, to ancestral knowledge about heritage landscapes in rural Ethiopia. The genesis of participatory practices in Africa are traced back to the 1950s, with examples of how this legacy has played out over six decades—setting the scene for a deeply rooted practice now gaining widespread acceptance. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage.

This book captures community voices in matters relating to their relationship with specific archaeological heritage sites and landscapes in the Limpopo Province of South Africa. Focusing on the stonewalled archaeological heritage associated with Venda speakers and the reburial in 2008 of human remains excavated by the University of Pretoria from the cultural landscape of Mapungubwe, the book attempts to establish why archaeology and cultural heritage conservation struggle for relevance in South Africa today. In articulating the relevance of archaeology in South Africa in particular and southern Africa in general and in the context of public or community-based archaeology, the book explores how communities and the public interact, use and negotiate with their pasts. The research critiques the notion of archaeological heritage conservation and attempts to understand cultural heritage conservation from the perspectives of descendant communities. The book further exposes the conflict between cultural heritage protection efforts and modern development and questions the role of such efforts, given the challenges of unemployment, social inequality and poverty in democratic South Africa. The book is also about community engagement in archaeology, specifically in matters relating to access to cultural heritage resources. This study suggests that there is scope for community archaeology to take centre stage and drive future directions in archaeology if archaeologists change their approach in dealing with communities. Researchers are challenged in this study to rethink the notion of heritage, to debate the objectives behind cultural heritage conservation and to critically reexamine the relevance of archaeology today. This study suggests that the conflicting positions between heritage managers, archaeologists and descendant communities may be resolved through sharing of 'tradition' with the 'present'.

This book is about the way that professionals in archaeology and in other sectors of heritage interact with a range of stakeholder groups, communities and the wider public. Whilst these issues have been researched and discussed over many years and in many geographical contexts, the debate seems to have settled into a comfortable stasis wherein it is assumed that all that can be done by way of engagement has been done and there is little left to achieve. In some cases, such engagement is built on legislation or codes of ethics and there can be little doubt that it is an important and significant aspect of heritage policy. This book is different, however, because it questions not so much the motivations of heritage professionals but the nature of the engagement itself, the extent to which this is collaborative or contested and the implications this has for the communities concerned. Furthermore, in exploring these issues in a variety of contexts around the world, it recognises that heritage provides a source of engagement within communities that is separate from professional discourse and can thus enable them to find voices of their own in the political processes that concern them and affect their development, identity and well-being. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies.