Maverick Heritages. Ugliness, Discomfort and Illegality in the Political and Social Construction of Heritage
My Session Status
The first section of the session focuses on relationships between regulated places and "alien" actors. Despite most heritage sites being strictly regulated through juridical, deontological or moral norms, "unauthorized" actors (for instance, street vendors, beggars or "clandestine" migrants), if not invading and occupying the sites per se, place themselves in the public places around "heritized" places. While such actors tend to be negatively characterized by politicians, city planners and formal-sector business owners as a blight on the aesthetics of heritage sites, it is far from clear that those who visit heritage sites and those vendors sell in and near the sites conceive of such a dichotomous relationship. Such frictions generated by the co-habitation of different spheres of value configure the aesthetics of heritage spaces as complexes of social, political and economic processes.
In the second section of the session, we extend our reflections on the structural contradictions imbricated in the rhetorics of beauty with regard to "heritized" objects (antiquities and ethnographic items circulating through the international market and "heritage" logos). We investigate the interrelations between opacity and transparency—the situations establishing ethical and aesthetical taken-for-granted intrinsic values in order to show that the sentiment of "beauty" and "goodness" of a given final product (objects, practices, individuals or categories) is directly proportional to the degree of opacity of production stages of products.
Convenors will be pleased to receive papers fitting the parts below:
Part I - The politics of aesthetical authenticity in relation to the anti-aesthetics of pollution
Throughout the world there are numerous examples of the proper order and organization of places and people being inverted. In heritage sites, despite the dominant discourses of the state, UNESCO and tourism industry, the sense of objects, places and words can take on counter aesthetics and alternative meanings for political and economic reasons. Here, we explore how political and aesthetical authenticity is constructed in different heritage domains through a selective concept of aesthetical pollution.
Part II - Ontologies of beauty and illegality within the clandestine art trade
The construction of heritage and clandestine art trade are often mutually constituted in heritage sites. This slot focuses on the organic relationship between beauty and Illegality in art trade. Here, we question how places are affected by the aesthetics and ethics that serve to brand a place/object, leading to new negotiations of value through alternative concepts of beauty that emerge from the ways that places and objects are "heritized" and used within logics of tourism and market.
Sub Sessions
The UNESCO World Heritage aesthetic of Antigua Guatemala is well entrenched in the representations of the city and the collective memories of its residents. In this aesthetic-representational field, the city’s eighteenth-century Spanish Colonial Baroque-style architecture takes centre stage, displacing the people who work and live there. Yet, despite these hegemonic aesthetics, backed by local and national laws and UNESCO conventions, the actual practice of heritage by residents, street wo...
L’imbrication de l’économie informelle, voire illégale, dans l’histoire sociale a considérablement caractérisé la littérature sur la migration internationale en Italie, plus spécifiquement à Rome. Ainsi des trajectoires de migration hétérogènes dessinent des espaces d’absence et d’émergence où l’absence est envisagée en tant qu’état social ou politique sous-représenté d’où affleurent des dynamiques « émergentes » de création et de changement social aux temporalités in fieri. Dans c...
On the Pacific Coast of Oaxaca, Mexico, in 1996 members of the community of La Ventanilla formed a cooperative focused on offering eco-tours of the nearby mangrove. In the intervening years and in spite of being hit by two hurricanes, the co-op has become the economic mainstay for most of the community’s approximately twenty-nine families with nearly 45,000 visitors in each of the last three years. In addition to the tours offered by the co-op’s approximately eighteen “guias” (guides), its...