Abstract
This paper makes use of feminist posthumanism to outline how a range of heritage policies, practices and strategies, partly through their base in social constructivism have a clear anthropocentric focus. Not only do they risk downplaying materiality, but also a number of human and non-human others, driving a wedge between nature and culture. This may in turn be an obstacle for the use of heritage in sustainable development as it deals with range of naturalized others as if they have no agency and leaves the stage open for appropriation and exploi- tation. This paper probes into what heritage could be in the wake of current climate and environmental challenges if approached differently. It explores how a selection of feminist posthumanisms challenge the distinction between nature:culture in a way that could shift the approach to sustainability in heritage making from a negative to an affirmative framing.
Highlights
This paper makes use of feminist posthumanism to outline how a range of heritage policies, practices and strategies, partly through their base in social constructivism have a clear anthropocentric focus
This paper deals with how heritage policy could work with sustainable development if there was an openness to more symmetrical relations to things
How does a focus on relations between human and non-human others provide an alternative to the anthropocentrism prevalent in many heri tage documents? How would a decentring of an idealized human subject affect the divide between natural and cultural heritage? In what way would such a move change how the link between heritage and sustainability is understood to work? This paper probes into what heritage could be in the wake of current climate and environmental challenges if approached differently
Summary
This paper makes use of feminist posthumanism to outline how a range of heritage policies, practices and strategies, partly through their base in social constructivism have a clear anthropocentric focus Do they risk downplaying materiality, and a number of human and non-human others, driving a wedge between nature and culture. An alternative approach, examined in this paper is posthumanist feminisms (cf Haraway 2008; Braidotti 2013; Barad 2012), that within the field of environmental humanities investigate human-animal-nature relations with tools that acknowledge the environment as having agency, challenges essentialism and where the notion of nature:cultures or naturecultures (Haraway 2008: 15) works to perforate the boundaries between the two spheres. This means to change the humanities and the natural sciences by adopting an approach that deals with the alienation, intangibility and the negative framing of environmental change, the post-political situation and how “the environment” is compartmentalized from other matters of concern (Neimanis, Åsberg & Hedrén 2015)
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