Public archaeology, knowledge meetings and heritage ethics in southern Africa: an approach from Mozambique

Abstract

What do researchers and heritage practitioners do when their concepts of place do not coincide with those held by local communities? Discussing a case study from Mozambique against its wider southern African backdrop, this article argues that professionals cannot overlook the fact that many rural communities in this part of Africa do their version of ‘archaeology’ by reconstructing the past via their ancestors. The primary focus is to establish a ground for epistemic levelling between ‘scientific’ and ‘other’ knowledges and an ensuing heritage ethics from which to articulate a set of key tenets for future engagements with local communities and public archaeology. In order to develop an approach that is inclusive and within the scope of ‘a truly engaged archaeology’, we explore the potential of encounters between different epistemologies, between those of professional practitioners and those of the public they engage with.

Keywords:

• Public archaeology
• epistemologies
• heritage ethics
• local communities
• southern Africa
• Mozambique

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway through the Yggdrasil Mobility Programme 2012–13 (Project nr: 219764/F11), which allowed the corresponding author to be based at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History of the University of Oslo between January and July 2013. We are grateful for all the institutional support received. The research on traditional custodianship systems was undertaken as part of a master’s project at the University of the Witwatersrand and the Rock Art Research Institute (RARI) in Johannesburg (South Africa) between 2008 and 2010, funded by the African World Heritage Fund and the University of the Witwatersrand. We are grateful to Tore Sætersdal and the South Africa Rock Art Digital Archive (SARADA) at RARI for authorizing the reproduction of images in this manuscript. We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on a draft of this paper.

Notes

1 Giblin continues: ‘Essentially, archaeologists, as members of a self-constructed and self-regulating institutional body of experts, appropriate the pasts of “others” and in the name of science, conservation, and education restrict access to those pasts to comparable authorized experts. Thus the post-colonial critique has identified a structural and epistemological decolonial challenge that concerns all forms of knowledge production, including archaeology’ (Giblin 2012, 126).

2 This latter intangible heritage discourse has in recent years been increasingly criticized for reducing tangible, material things to epiphenomena of intangible social processes (e.g. Pétursdóttir 2013).

3 A conventional definition of the term ‘indigenous and local knowledge’ is as ‘specific systems of knowledge and practice, developed and accumulated over generations within a particular cultural group and region, and [which] as such are unique to that group and region’ (Mwaura 2008, 22).

4 To us, communities are complex and heterogeneous, with fluid boundaries and membership, often consisting of groups within groups, with competing and overlapping factions, and with members who have diverse perspectives, needs and expectations. Furthermore, archaeological projects often involve multiple ‘stakeholder’ communities (Atalay 2010, 421). Similarly, the term ‘public’ can be broken down into multiple audiences with differing interests and expectations (Pyburn 2011, 36).

5 This NORAD (Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation) funded project established a platform for research in central Mozambique’s Manica and Tete provinces, and included a management plan for the Chinhamapere rock art site which incorporated contemporary, local community usages. To answer local concerns about the documentation of traditions, the project also produced two documentary films in the local Shona dialect, Chi-Manyika. One, entitled Making Rain (2007), explained the current use of the rock-art sites. The other, entitled If Vagina Had Teeth: the Shona Rainmaking Ceremony in Western Mozambique (2009), documented people’s current relationship with the sacred landscapes. The project included the creation of a local museum (see Bang and Sætersdal 2012), which functions as community cultural centre, library and exhibition gallery.

6 The term is thus similar in several respects to ‘traditional ecological knowledge’ (see Berkes 1999).

7 We use the term traditional chiefs to refer to a form of leadership in which authority derives from tradition or custom.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Albino Jopela

Albino Jopela is a lecturer in archaeology and heritage studies in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique and a PhD candidate at the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. He is also a researcher at Kaleidoscopio (Research in Public Policy and Culture) in Mozambique and Vice-President of the PanAfrican Archaeological Association. His research interests includes heritage management systems (traditional custodianship systems), rock-art conservation, heritage sociopolitics and liberation heritage in Mozambique and southern Africa.

Per Ditlef Fredriksen

Per Ditlef Fredriksen is Associate Professor in Archaeology in the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo in Norway, and a research associate in the Department of Archaeology, University of Cape Town in South Africa. His research interests include critical heritage studies, archaeological studies of contemporary rural southern Africa, as well as theoretical and methodological issues relating to the relationships between archaeology, history and social anthropology.