Engagement, Gentrification, and the Neoliberal Hijacking of History

Michael Herzfeld

doi:10.1086/653420

Abstract

Drawing primarily on fieldwork in Greece, Italy, and Thailand, I examine the use of historic conservation to justify gentrification. This commoditization of history expands into urban design a classification that serves the goals of neoliberal modernity. By thus refocusing the classic anthropological concern with taxonomy on the analysis of the bureaucratic production of everyday experience and knowledge, I explore a new global habitus in which dominant interpretations of history spatially reinforce current ideologies. Historic conservation often provides an excuse for intervention into urban life. In a revision of high modernism’s focus on science, logic, and efficiency, this trend invokes “the past.” But which past? The concept of “heritage” is grounded in culturally specific ideologies of kinship, residence, and property, but the universalization of the nation‐state as a collectivity of similar subunits has given those concepts globally hegemonic power. In consequence, phenomena that governments treat ...

Highlights

Drawing primarily on fieldwork in Greece, Italy, and Thailand, I examine the use of historic conservation to justify gentrification
By juxtaposing historic conservation and gentrification with a critique of the public management of knowledge, I sketch a critical trajectory for anthropological engagement in “the politics of mereness” by asking who defines what matters in residents’ lives
We find a rhetoric of heritage held in trust for future generations and representing a collective past and Michael Herzfeld is Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Harvard University (William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, U.S.A. [herzfeld@wjh.harvard.edu])

Summary

Introduction

My active participation in the struggle of the Bangkok community of Pom Mahakan to remain located on its present dwelling site, in the middle of a monument claimed as historic by the national ideology and the municipal authorities, elicited skepticism from positivistic social scientists, members of the public, and numerous officials, all of whom raised doubts that I would have good, uncontaminated data.

Results

Conclusion