Abstract
Heritage is a discourse that aims at closure. It fixates the narrative of the past through the celebration of specific material (or sometimes immaterial non-) ob-jects. It organizes temporality and construct events and freezes time. How does this unfold in the case of the UNESCO World Heritage site of Stone Town, Zan-zibar? It is a place of beauty and violence, of trade, slavery and tourism, and the World Heritage narrative does not accommodate all its significant historical facts and lived memories. In this article I will discuss some of these conflicting or competing historical facts.
The anthropologist Anna Tsing has developed the concept-metaphor friction as a way to discuss the energy created when various actors narrate “the same” event(s) in different ways, and see the other participants’ accounts as fantasies or even fabrications. I will use my position as researcher and my relations to differ-ent sources: informants, authorities and texts, and discuss how different accounts relate to and partly construct each other; and how I, in my own process as an ana-lyst and listener, negotiate these conflicting stories, what I identify as valid and non valid accounts. The case in this article is Stone Town in Zanzibar and the de-velopment and dissolution going on under the shadow of the UNESCO World Heritage flag; a growing tourism; a global and local increase in islamisation; and the political tension within the Tanzanian union. My main focus is narratives of the identity of Zanzibar since heritagization constructs identity.
The anthropologist Anna Tsing has developed the concept-metaphor friction as a way to discuss the energy created when various actors narrate “the same” event(s) in different ways, and see the other participants’ accounts as fantasies or even fabrications. I will use my position as researcher and my relations to differ-ent sources: informants, authorities and texts, and discuss how different accounts relate to and partly construct each other; and how I, in my own process as an ana-lyst and listener, negotiate these conflicting stories, what I identify as valid and non valid accounts. The case in this article is Stone Town in Zanzibar and the de-velopment and dissolution going on under the shadow of the UNESCO World Heritage flag; a growing tourism; a global and local increase in islamisation; and the political tension within the Tanzanian union. My main focus is narratives of the identity of Zanzibar since heritagization constructs identity.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue number | 2014 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1299-1318 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| ISSN | 2000-1525 |
| Publication status | Published - 2014 |