Research project
Tackling Heritage
During the Tackling Heritage sessions, we bring together people at different stages of their academic trajectory, primarily from Leiden University's Cultural Anthropology department but also beyond. Through collective reading, discussion, and collaborative experiments, we take an anthropological approach to heritage-related questions and foster critical conversations about heritage. These conversations have engaged themes such as scale and temporality, questions of home and belonging, and debates on democratisation and decolonisation in heritage.
- Duration
- 2025 - 2030
- Contact
- Aditree Amin
What is Tackling Heritage?
The concept of heritage has been the subject of extensive debate, so much so that an entire interdisciplinary field of study has been dedicated to it. Beyond academia, heritage also plays an important role in political and social discourse, often appearing in conversations about identity, belonging, and collective memory. Anthropology contributes uniquely to these discussions by examining how people engage with the past through everyday practices and social relationships. Tackling Heritage builds on this tradition by creating a space to explore heritage-related questions with an anthropological lens.
Tackling Heritage fosters a collaborative environment that brings together scholars at different stages of their academic journeys, primarily from the Cultural Anthropology department at Leiden University, along with colleagues from diverse disciplines and institutions. Together, we explore themes such as scale and temporality, home and belonging, as well as debates surrounding democratisation and decolonisation in heritage. The initiative approaches heritage as a field of inquiry, examining how people assign value to particular histories, how objects, landscapes, and practices come to be recognised as heritage, and how these processes are shaped through social relations, institutions, and everyday practices.
What We Have Done So Far
Our sessions combine shared readings, guest contributions, and reflections drawn from participants’ own research. Discussions move between theoretical debates and ethnographic cases from different regions. Participants from diverse geographical and academic backgrounds bring insights from Bhutan, India, Bangladesh, China, Korea, Taiwan, and Guatemala, and several European contexts, with each session bringing together a different constellation of contributors.
These discussions explore how people work with the past through landscapes, religious practices, migration histories, everyday objects, and sensory experiences. Engaging with this range of cases, participants reflect on assumptions that often structure Eurocentric heritage debates and on how ideas of “the past” are shaped by situated temporal frameworks. At the same time, the conversations highlight how “heritage” itself is not a universal category and how language and distinct practices organise relationships to the past in countless ways, associating them with situated knowledges, values, and material or intangible forms.
Through these exchanges, Tackling Heritage provides a space where participants can test ideas, reflect on methodological questions, and collectively think through how heritage is defined, practised, and contested across different contexts.
Future Programme
- April: Film Screening (details to be announced
- May: Reading Group (details to be announced)