Heritage and the politics of recognition.

What is it about?

The politics of identity cannot simply be dismissed as empty or abstract gesturing. The conflicts that occur around the rights to control the expression of cultural identity have important material consequences for struggles over economic resources and struggles for equity and human rights. This chapter examines the role that archaeologists, often unwittingly, play in the arbitration of identity politics and the consequences this has for both the discipline and, more specifically, Australian Indigenous communities. Drawing on a critical reading of Foucault’s later work on governmentality (Foucault 1979), this chapter provides a theoretical framework for understanding the conflicts that arise when archaeological knowledge and expertise about the material past intersects with the use of that past as indigenous heritage. This analysis is used to inform a discussion of the ways in which the Waanyi community of far northwest Queensland has asserted an oppositional understanding of the nature and meaning of heritage. In these conflicts, heritage becomes a political resource around which archaeologists, indigenous peoples and other interests negotiate and play out struggles for political recognition and legitimacy. Challenges to received notions of heritage are actively used by the Waanyi to help underpin their demands to access and control of land. In this challenge, the role and authority of archaeological expertise is redefined and renegotiated in more politically useful ways. In short, this chapter argues that heritage is both a resource in, and a process of, negotiation in the cultural politics of identity. Archaeologists and other heritage “experts” are therefore required to make conscious and informed choices in the ways in which they define and engage with heritage, and those communities who have a stake in heritage management.

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