Living in a World Heritage Site: Ethnography of Houses and Daily Life in the Fez Medina

by Manon Istasse

Overview

Through a thick ethnography of the Fez medina in Morocco, a World Heritage site since 1981, Manon Istasse interrogates how human beings come to define houses as heritage. Istasse interrogates how heritage appears (or not) when inhabitants undertake construction and restoration projects in their homes, furnish and decorate their spaces, talk about their affective and sensual relations with houses, face conflicts in and about their houses, and more. Shedding light on the continuum between houses-as-dwellings and houses-as-heritage, the author establishes heritage as a trajectory: heritage as a quality results from a ‘surplus of attention’ and relates to nostalgia or to a feeling of threat, loss, and disappearance; to values related to purity, materiality, and time; and to actions of preservation and transmission. Living in a World Heritage site provides a grammar of heritage that will allow scholars to question key notions of temporality and nostalgia, the idea of culture, theimportance of experts, and moral principles in relation to heritage sites around the globe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030174507
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	07/05/2019
Series:	Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology
Edition description:	1st ed. 2019
Pages:	293
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Manon Istasse is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie de Mondes Contemporains (LAMC) at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements.- List of Abbreviations.- List of Pictures.- Chapter 1: Introduction.-Chapter 2: Fez.- Part I: Houses in Fez: A Materialist Approach.- Chapter 3: Undertaking Work in a House.- Chapter 4: Furnishing and Decorating a House.- Chapter 5: Intimacy, Hospitality and Tradition in Tourist Accommodation.- Part II: Attachment to Houses: Home and Heritage.- Chapter 6: Sensual, Affective, and Cognitive Relations with Houses.- Chapter 7: From Conflicts to the Attachment to Houses.- Part III: Heritage in Fez.- Chapter 8: Heritage: Forms, Grammar, and Circulation.- Chapter 9: Conclusion.- Glossary.- Index.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This nuanced and theoretically sophisticated ethnography shows us that people and houses forge intimate relationships which—even in a place replete with history—go far beyond what a cultural heritage discourse singles out. Istasse delivers a major contribution to urban and architectural anthropology, critical heritage research, and the study of materiality and its social life.” (Christoph Brumann, Head of Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany)