Conflict, Heritage and World-Making in the Chaco: War at the End of the Worlds?

Conflict, Heritage and World-Making in the Chaco documents and interprets the physical remains and afterlives of the Chaco War (1932-35) – known as South America’s first ‘modern’ armed conflict – in what is now present-day Paraguay. It focuses not only on archaeological remains as conventionally understood, but takes an ontological approach to heterogeneous assemblages of objects, texts, practices and landscapes shaped by industrial war and people’s past and present engagements with them. These assemblages could be understood to constitute a ‘dark heritage’, the debris of a failed modernity. Yet it is clear that they are not simply dead memorials to this bloody war, but have been, and continue to be active in making, unmaking and remaking worlds – both for the participants and spectators of the war itself, as well as those who continue to occupy and live amongst the vast accretions of war matériel which persist in the present. Framing the study as an exploration of modern, industrialised warfare as Anthropocene ‘hyperobject’ (Morton 2013), This book shows how the material culture and heritage of modern conflict fuse together objects, people and landscapes, connecting them physically and conceptually across vast, almost unimaginable distances and time periods. She offers a unique perspective on the heritage of conflict, the natural environment, practices of recycling, the concept of time, and the idea of the ‘Anthropocene’ itself, as seen through the lens of the material legacies of war, which remain firmly and stubbornly embedded in the present and which continue to actively shape the future. It makes a major contribution to key debates in anthropology, archaeology, environmental humanities, critical heritage and material culture studies on the significance of conflict in understanding the Anthropocene, and the roles played by its persistent heritages in assembling worlds

From Ark to Bank: Extinction, proxies and biocapital in ex-situ biodiversity conservation practices

This paper takes a critical approach to understanding the social and cultural ‘work’ of natural heritage conservation, focussing specifically on ex-situ biodiversity cryopreservation practices. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with the Frozen Ark, a UK-based ‘frozen zoo’ aiming to preserve the DNA of endangered animal species, the paper situates the development of non-human animal biobanks in relation to current anxieties regarding the anticipated loss of biodiversity. These developments are seeding new global futures by driving advances in technologies, techniques and practices of cloning, de-extinction, re-wilding and potential species re-introduction. While this provides impetus to rethink the nature of ‘nature’ itself, as something which is actively made by such conservation practices, we also aim to make a contribution to the development of a series of critical concepts for analysis of ex-situ and in-situ natural heritage preservation practices, which further illuminates their roles in building distinctive futures, through discussion of the relationship between conservation proxies, biobanking and biocapitals. We suggest that questions of value and the role of future making in relation to heritage cannot be disassociated from an analysis of economic issues, and, therefore, the paper is framed within a broader discussion of the place of ex-situ biodiversity cryopreservation in the late capitalist global economy

Heritage Futures: Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices

Preservation of natural and cultural heritage is often said to be something that is done for the future, or on behalf of future generations, but the precise relationship of such practices to the future is rarely reflected upon. Heritage Futures draws on research undertaken over four years by an interdisciplinary, international team of 16 researchers and more than 25 partner organisations to explore the role of heritage and heritage-like practices in building future worlds. Engaging broad themes such as diversity, transformation, profusion and uncertainty, Heritage Futures aims to understand how a range of conservation and preservation practices across a number of countries assemble and resource different kinds of futures, and the possibilities that emerge from such collaborative research for alternative approaches to heritage in the Anthropocene. Case studies include the cryopreservation of endangered DNA in frozen zoos, nuclear waste management, seed biobanking, landscape rewilding, social history collecting, space messaging, endangered language documentation, built and natural heritage management, domestic keeping and discarding practices, and world heritage site management

Heritage Futures - Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices

This is the final version. Available on open access from UCL Press via the DOI in this recordWe present the book as a co-authored monograph because we acknowledge the collective contributions to the arguments developed within it, and the collaborative nature of the work. This has in itself been an experiment in finding a format in which diverse voices and views could productively speak to one another, while also acknowledging and foregrounding the diversity and range of different views, academic traditions and writing styles of contributors. As principal investigator, Harrison acted as the lead and coordinating author of the book, taking overall responsibilities for its editing and production. The co-investigators (DeSilvey, Holtorf, Macdonald) shared with Harrison editorial responsibilities for the individual thematic parts they each led, and for shaping the intellectual agenda of the book as a whole. However, we also felt it important to indicate the main authors of individual chapters within the book, to make clear specific contributions to the text and its arguments, and to highlight which named individuals were responsible for the empirical work that underpins them. Preservation of natural and cultural heritage is often said to be something that is done for the future, or on behalf of future generations, but the precise relationship of such practices to the future is rarely reflected upon. Heritage Futures draws on research undertaken over four years by an interdisciplinary, international team of 16 researchers and more than 25 partner organisations to explore the role of heritage and heritage-like practices in building future worlds. Engaging broad themes such as diversity, transformation, profusion and uncertainty, Heritage Futures aims to understand how a range of conservation and preservation practices across a number of countries assemble and resource different kinds of futures, and the possibilities that emerge from such collaborative research for alternative approaches to heritage in the Anthropocene. Case studies include the cryopreservation of endangered DNA in frozen zoos, nuclear waste management, seed biobanking, landscape rewilding, social history collecting, space messaging, endangered language documentation, built and natural heritage management, domestic keeping and discarding practices, and world heritage site management.Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC

Making Futures in End Times: Rethinking Nature Conservation in the Anthropocene

The question we ask here is what does it mean to conserve ‘nature’ in the Anthropocene, or what Marris (2013) has termed a ‘post-wild world’? The aim of this chapter is to explore some of the distinctive ways in which scientists and conservationists are responding to these challenges and how we might critically investigate the socio-cultural work which surrounds such efforts before returning to some of the ways in which the recognition of the Anthropocene as the age of humans both troubles and is troubled by such efforts. Working across natural and cultural heritage, our work is informed by observations of the ways in which research in what we might call ‘the climate change era’ forces a dissolution of the distinction between natural and cultural history (Chakrabarty 2009). Here we intersect with a new critical engagement with nature conservation (e.g. Benson 2010; Lorimer 2015) and extinction studies (e.g. Bird Rose 2013; Heise 2016; van Dooren 2016; Bird Rose, van Dooren and Chrulew 2017) in exploring the distinct social and cultural frameworks which produce ‘natural heritage’, and the ways in which ‘cultural heritage’ is not outside of, but integrally a part of them (e.g. Harrison 2015; DeSilvey 2017). Our work also connects both conceptually and empirically with recent anthropological engagements with ‘futures’ (e.g. Appadurai 2013; Salazar et al. 2017; Harrison et al. 2020), and with current creative academic engagements with global climatological and environmental change (e.g. Haraway 2016; Tsing 2015; Tsing et al. 2017) and the multiple worldings (cf. Barad 2007; de la Cadena and Blaser 2018; Omura et al. 2018; for heritage see Breithoff 2020) of their entangled conservation practices