“With a rhetoric of diversity, sustainability, and conservation, neoliberal forces typecast entire societies as both money-spinning tourist fodder and evil destroyers of pristine nature. Meskell incisively exposes the resulting structural violence of conservation in South Africa, showing how managerial simplification of the country’s painful historical experience and complex archaeological record perpetuates past oppressions and exclusions. The Nature of Heritage gives timely shape and heft to concern for the future of the past – and the future of humanity.”
– Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University
“In one sense this is a book about the loss of innocence – of how the dream of cultural heritage in a new South Africa has been swamped by narrower interests and the tourism market. But it also a reassertion of the value and significance of archaeological ethnography, of showing how ‘past-mastering’ is invariably the outcome of compromises, and imbued with politics.”
– Martin Hall, University of Salford
From the Inside Flap
The Nature of Heritage: The New South Africa is a groundbreaking work by archaeologist Lynn Meskell that examines the conflicts inherent in natural versus cultural heritage. The author brings archaeological and ethnographic evidence to bear on a holistic understanding of one nation’s self-identification by developing its protected areas and cultural heritage sites. Post-apartheid South Africa is a classic example of how nations attempt to overcome negative heritage through past mastering. The case study of Kruger National Park vividly demonstrates this process through both cultural and natural resource development, as it becomes enmeshed in the interventions of the state and private sectors, salvage, conservation, and notions of social good. Meskell argues that cultural heritage has emerged as secondary to the conservation of nature, but that the idea of heritage as therapy provides a potential ongoing strategy for socio-economic empowerment and development.
From the Back Cover
The Nature of Heritage: The New South Africa is a groundbreaking work by archaeologist Lynn Meskell that examines the conflicts inherent in natural versus cultural heritage. The author brings archaeological and ethnographic evidence to bear on a holistic understanding of one nation’s self-identification by developing its protected areas and cultural heritage sites. Post-apartheid South Africa is a classic example of how nations attempt to overcome negative heritage through past mastering. The case study of Kruger National Park vividly demonstrates this process through both cultural and natural resource development, as it becomes enmeshed in the interventions of the state and private sectors, salvage, conservation, and notions of social good. Meskell argues that cultural heritage has emerged as secondary to the conservation of nature, but that the idea of heritage as therapy provides a potential ongoing strategy for socio-economic empowerment and development.
About the Author
Lynn Meskell is Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University (USA) and Honorary Professor at the Rock Art Research Institute in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa). She is the founder and editor of the Journal of Social Archaeology, and the author and editor of several books, including A Companion to Social Archaeology (Wiley-Blackwell), Archaeologies of Materiality (Wiley-Blackwell), and Cosmopolitan Archaeologies.
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