Patrimonial Ethics and the Field of Heritage Production

Abstract

This chapter explores different historically and culturally contingent ethical models that inform archaeologists’ and anthropologists’ practices concerning heritage sites and their preservation. Rather than seeing the meanings of heritage sites as produced primarily through an authorized, hegemonic discourse, the author argues that such significances—and the concomitant notions of ethical (“right, fair, just or good”) actions towards such sites and the social worlds they occupy—are continually shaped through the positioning and position-taking of many diverse epistemic groups who stake claims to the site within a “field of heritage production.” Two distinctive ethical paradigms appear to be most prominent among archaeologists and anthropologists. The first is what the author terms “paternalistic ethics,” which is manifested when these groups assume an explicitly dominant position as both “experts” and self-defined stewards of cultural property over other epistemic groups that may lay claim to it. The second is termed “multicultural ethics,” which posits a distinctively explicit openness (if only superficially) to incorporating alternative or “minority” voices in acts of designating and preserving objects of cultural heritage—voices that specifically come from equally alternative epistemic “cultures.” Yet building on critiques of multiculturalism from Asad and Gnecco, among others, the author argues that even this paradigm does not adequately take into consideration the fact that a heritage site exists on many different and oft-conflicting planes and scales (local, regional, national, transnational), is valued by different groups for different reasons, and is strategically deployed for different ideological reasons. The author suggests that a new ethical paradigm should be adopted, which he calls “patrimonial ethics.” This model focuses both on the multi-vocality of all stakeholders (including “indigenous” and “Westerners,” or “insiders” and “outsiders”) as well as on the heritage object itself, pregnant as it is with myriad meanings.