Transnational turns for archaeological heritage: From conservation to development, governments to governance

Abstract

National sentiments have historically overwhelmed global ones in the modern era. Archaeology was born in the service of the nation-state, as a technical means for engaging with the past within a specific calculus of territory, sovereignty, and nationhood. Significant shifts are currently underway, however, towards transnational modes and mechanisms of governance that have arisen in the wake of international dysfunction and neoliberal reforms. Within this emerging field of action it is development, rather than conservation, that shapes the diverse work of archaeological practice in the world. Transnational sociopolitical contexts for archaeological practice most visibly gained traction with multilateral development banks’ turn to heritage development in the 1990s, built around the tenets of participation, capacity-building, and sustainability. From these roots a second generation of concerns has emerged—transnational communities, heritage rights, and global climate change—for archaeological practice attuned to a “politics of engagement” (Mullins 2011) in a transnational key.

Keywords:

• transnational
• heritage development
• community
• heritage rights
• global climate change

Acknowledgments

A portion of this research was supported by the US-Norway Fulbright Foundation, and I am grateful to my gracious hosts at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU). This paper benefitted from the constructive feedback of three anonymous reviewers, for which I am appreciative.

ORCID

Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1150-9297

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels

Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels (Ph.D. 2010, Stanford University) is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maryland. Her work joins ethnographic and archaeological methods to study the contemporary sociopolitical contexts of archaeological practice and heritage management, focusing in particular on global relations forged through heritage work in international economic development, human rights, democracy building, and global climate change. Her current fieldwork studies the archaeological heritage of fossil fuel extraction and exploitation in light of anthropogenic climate change.