(In)adequacies of Heritage Conservation and Management: Socio-Spatial Contestations of the Piedmont-Scrublands, Ramanadi Basin, Tamirabarani Productive Landscape

Abstract

ABSTRACT Prima facie, our field-site, the piedmont-scrublands of Ramanadi Basin, Tamirabarani productive landscape, in the South Indian peninsula, is a Historical Irrigated Landscape (HIL). However, here, we neither reiterate our field-site as a HIL in need of site-specific solution, nor do we argue for evermore (sub)categories to manage such diverse heritage. We draw on our interdisciplinary fieldwork and argue that the polysemic nature of landscapes and their components are part of their complex contextual lived realities. Continuing to see the multiple meanings and contestations exclusively as ‘wicked problems’ that impinge on practice and policy would be a disservice to the discipline’s well-documented histories of learning through praxis. An ethnographic approach enriched by archival and cartographic studies, which we developed over successive field engagements, enabled us to foreground the (in)adequacies of current heritage conservation-management models, as analytic and heuristic, and present a more progressive model for heritage conservation-management pedagogy.