Heritage, Power, and Liminality

This book delivers a fresh approach to understanding cultural heritage amid an under-explored yet dynamic global force: the uncertainty of political transition.

Since the turn of the 21st century, transition has defined geopolitics across the globe – from a sharp rise in hybrid authoritarian-democratic regimes and an unsettling shift toward post-truth politics to the accelerating threat of technological warfare. As the past is constantly renegotiated to suit the ever-changing needs of the present, cultural heritage emerges as both beacon and battleground. Employing the versatile concept of contemporary liminality from political anthropology, this book provides critical heritage studies with a novel approach to understanding the interplay between heritage and transition. It illuminates how different political groups use cultural heritage as a tool for navigating the uncertainty of transitional crisis in their quests to legitimise power or to resist it. Drawing on a synthesis of two centuries of political transitions in Myanmar and interviews with military officials, pro-democracy leaders, cultural experts, and everyday people, an innovative critique which ventures into the backstage spaces of cultural production emerges.

The book makes a unique contribution by theorising a modality of ‘liminal heritage’, cultural expression that takes on qualities of its transitional-liminal context, such as absurdity, ambiguity, imitation, violence, and inversion, particularly potent in authoritarian contexts. It will appeal to scholars and researchers with interests in sociology, political anthropology, heritage studies, museum studies, and Asian studies.