Multitemporality and Entanglements in Namibia
摘要
A substantive body of heritage scholarship describes and discusses the anthropocentric and politicised nature of heritage conservation. Many scholars agree that heritage has become symbolic capital, a way for those in power to publicly reformulate identity and reallocate power. There are, however, alternative discussions on heritage conservation as re-presentations of the past, a rich source of social meaning and an arena for environmental conservation. In the present epoch however (and as this chapter suggests), there is multitemporal and multidimensional heritage. These require radical perspectivism and environmental decoloniality. The following chapter on Namibia seeks to articulate the multitemporal and entangled nature of cultural heritage in the country. It offers ethnographic findings on a holistic and transmaterial cultural heritage that runs counter to a powerful masculinist-realist, objective heritage management. The chapter reframes Namibia’s cultural heritage and inadvertently reorients perspective on the concept, encouraging consideration of the geospiritual, temporal and dimensional aspects of heritage, which up to now are excluded from the largely modernist, teleological and realist frames of heritage.