Constructing Destruction: Heritage Narratives in the Tsunami City

by Trinidad Rico

Overview

Large-scale disasters mobilize heritage professionals to a narrative of heritage-at-risk and a standardized set of processes to counter that risk. Trinidad Rico’s critical ethnography analyses heritage practices in the aftermath of the tsunami that swamped Banda Aceh, Indonesia, in 2004 and the post-destruction narratives that accompanied it, showing the sociocultural, historical, and political agendas these discourses raise. Countering the typical Western ideology and practice of ameliorating heritage-at-risk were local, post-colonial trajectories that permitted the community to construct its own meaning of heritage. This book documents the emergence of local heritage places, practices, and debates countering the globalized versions embraced by the heritage professions offering a critical paradigm for post-destruction planning and practice that incorporates alternative models of heritage. Constructing Deconstruction will be of value to scholars, professionals, and advanced students in Heritage Studies, Anthropology, Geography, and Disaster Studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781629584379
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	04/04/2016
Series:	UCL Institute of Archaeology Critical Cultural Heritage Series , #12
Pages:	136
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Trinidad Rico is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Texas A&M University at Qatar, and Honorary Lecturer at UCL. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University, an MA in Cultural and Social Anthropology from Stanford University, an MA in Principles of Conservation from UCL, and a BA in Archaeology and Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. Her areas of research include ethnographic heritage, critical heritage studies and risk, the construction of Islamic materiality, and cosmopolitanism and the vernacularization of discourses and expertise. Her recent work focuses on the construction and operation of vulnerability in cultural heritage discourses and methods in Indonesia, and the mobilization of Islamic values in heritage making in Indonesia and the Arabian Peninsula. She is co-editor of Heritage Keywords: Rhetoric and Redescription in Cultural Heritage (University Press of Colorado, 2015) and Cultural Heritage in the Arabian Peninsula (Ashgate, 2014).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations 9

Preface 11

Introduction: The Problem with Destruction 15

From Destruction to Construction 17

Structure of this Volume 20

1 Khas Aceh 25

View from the Deck of the Tsunami Ship 30

Heritage as History or Heritage as Witness 36

2 Heritage Narratives in the Tsunami City 41

From Serambbi Mekkah to Tsunami City 41

Heritage History 43

Anti-heritage History 48

Disaster Legacies 52

3 The Construction of Destruction 61

Risk Cartographies 61

Heritage and Destruction 65

Risk Value 69

Asia "at Risk" 72

Indonesian Heritage 75

4 An Ethnography of "Heritage at Risk" 79

Heritage Ethnography 80

Ruins and Ruiners 82

True Water 86

Islamization of Catastrophe 90

Time and Timeliness 92

5 Destruction Alternatives 97

Reclaiming Post-Heritage 98

Situating Vernacular Subjects 100

Heritage Alterity: Theory versus Practice 102

Epilogue: "Then and Now" 107

Notes 111

References 115

Index 133

About the Author 137