Spirits of Heritage, Specters of Ruins: Partnering with the Jinn in the Preservation of the Past

Abstract

In her recent study of the heritage project that is contemporary New Orleans, anthropologist Shanon Dawdy has suggested that “[s]ociety presents itself simultaneously as a ruin and as a kind of playland” (2016, 147). This notion that the ruin is both a product of, and a basis for, heritage practice serves as a useful intervention into long-standing treatments of ruins as exotic, romantic, and awaiting the discovery, glorification, and preservation of those that might give them meaning. In the present essay, I further challenge heritage approaches to ruins through an examination of the ways in which they have been associated, in various Muslim cultural contexts, with a set of distinctly sentient, yet non-human actors, the jinn. This pairing between place and spirits has shaped long-standing affective responses and practical engagements between local (human) inhabitants and their archaeologically rich landscapes across the Middle East and North Africa. This essay examines how those engagements often push against contemporary discourses highlighting the sublime aspects of ruins and the quasi-sacred nature of heritage. To that end, the following guiding questions structure my contribution: Can contemporary heritage discourses accommodate practices in which humans share control and ownership of the material past with spectral others? How might we reframe the mandate to preserve such ruins in light of alternative perspectives that mark these sites as sinister, and/or meaningful, precisely because of their ruination? Can universalizing heritage discourses accommodate practices that derive value from the material past without also subscribing to explicit preservationist goals? Such questions offer an opportunity to consider the inclusion of the Unseen, and perhaps others, whose perspectives have gone unrecognized, within professional heritage management and its hermeneutics of the past.