Abstract
What is the value of heritage? A source of explosive emotions which oppose the “value” of so-called Western expertise – history of social and human sciences and constant reevaluation of the heritage market – versus the values in “becoming” of the people who recognise themselves in this heritage and who claim it as a foundation for an alternative and better life? In this paper, we examine some of the ways in which different groups in the Pacific reinterpret their heritage in order to redefine their singular values as cultural subjectivities: individual, collective and national, diasporic or transnational in the case of some Indigenous networks (Festival of the Pacific Arts, Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, etc).
Highlights
How can societies deal with different value systems in a way that does not lead to the total domination of one system by another?1 The framework of our discussion builds on a trend of engaged French scholarship in the Pacific that is evidenced in a number of recent conferences and publications (Dousset, Glowczewski & Salaün eds. 2014)
In order to understand the complexity of contemporary social relations, anthropology has to hold together the critique of the discipline’s former colonial applications and the many sources of enunciation of subjectivities which crisscross the changing values of history in the mainstream media and among formerly colonised people
According to many of us, the current question in anthropology does not consist in evaluating the authenticity of traditions but in analysing the existential efficiency of the new assemblages that patrimonialization gives rise to
Summary
Heritage is understood here not as a material inheritance of monuments and places but as a cultural process of knowledge and practices as listed in the Article 31 of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples which was ratified by the UN in 2007 – with a belated support from the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia: Indigenous Peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions, as well as the manifestations of their sciences, technologies and cultures, including human and genetic resources, seeds, medicines, knowledge of the properties of fauna and flora, oral traditions, literatures, designs, sports and traditional games and visual and performing arts. In order to understand the complexity of contemporary social relations, anthropology has to hold together the critique of the discipline’s former colonial applications and the many sources of enunciation of subjectivities which crisscross the changing values of history in the mainstream media and among formerly colonised people. Patrimonial objects, both material and intangible, crystallize complex emotions which reveal the conflicting values held by different audiences. By determining what should be archived, anthropologists as producers of a scientific validation, Indigenous peoples as care holders of values of “tradition” and “authenticity”, and institutions as promoters of both (science and culture), put forth a certain view of the world and of the place of regional history
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