Connecting Heritage: From Settler-Consumers to Co-Producers

Through a case study of the indigenous Ainu's practice of their intangible heritage (listed in UNESCO as upopo and rimse) in Japan, this paper will offer an alternative paradigm on heritage production that simultaneously traverses and unsettles binaries of authority and disempowered, authenticity and change, global and local, producer and consumer, discourse and practice, East and West. The Ainu and their traditional performances are strategically located between these binaries as they represent intersecting layers of (settler) colonialism and the politics of recognition. They are part of the global phenomenon of indigenous peoples displaced by settlers, with stolen remains and artifacts dispersed across Europe and Japan. This paper, then, looks at the complex role of heritage between settlers and the Ainu, shifting settlers into the role of co-producers rather than simply consumers, changing future interpretations of heritage production, interpretation and, ownership.