"The Senseable Past: History as Sensational Form".

1. Call for Papers:
Heritage and History: the Past as Sensational Form
Patrimônio e história: o passado como forma sensível
17-19 October 2011, Centro de Estudos Afro Orientais, Universidade Federal da Bahia,
Salvador, Brazil.
Conference organized by the NWO research
program ‘Heritage Dynamics: Politics of
Authentication and Aesthetics of Persuasion in
Ghana, South Africa, Brazil and the Netherlands’
Convenors:
Maria Paula Adinolfi
André Werneck de Andrade Bakker
Birgit Meyer
Luis Nicolau Parés
Mattijs van de Port
We are excited to announce a new conference of the NWO research program Heritage
Dynamics: Politics of Authentication and Aesthetics of Persuasion in Ghana, South Africa, Brazil
and the Netherlands, to be held in the city of Salvador, Bahia (Brazil) and hosted by the
Centro de Estudos Afro Orientais of the Federal University of Bahia.
Our research program ponders the salient paradox on which the politics of cultural
heritage thrives: while heritage refers to tangible and intangible repositories of value that
feature as given resources for identity politics, much effort is put in the actual making of
heritage. States make(-up) their historical canons; ethnic groups (re-)invent their ‘age old
traditions’; religious communities cast the sacred essence of their creed in ever new
media forms. However, when the made-up character of heritage becomes ostensibly
visible -- and an awareness of the constructedness of heritage becomes hard to avoid -- it
may render forms of cultural heritage vulnerable to perceptions of fakeness, shallowness,
randomness or partiality. For indeed, the appeal of cultural heritage often rests on its
denial of being a mere fabrication: it promises to provide an essential ground to socially
and culturally constructed identities.
In previous meetings (Amsterdam 2009; Accra 2010) we have been exploring and
analysing the authenticating strategies through which heritage forms become persuasive.
We have underscored the pivotal role of the body and the senses in processes of heritage

2. formation and perception. The sensory appeal of particular heritage forms turns out to
play an important role in persuading people of its truth and linking the heritage form and
its beholder. Successful heritage forms offer the possibility to sense the essence and power
of the cultural past (rather than grasp it intellectually); they make people feel that the
selected cultural forms are an ‘authentic’ part of their identity.
Under the title Heritage and History: the Past as Sensational Form, this conference seeks to
further our understandings of the politics of authentication and the aesthetics of
persuasion by rethinking how sensational heritage forms intersect with the forces of
history.
Cultural heritage always involves an historical framing. Historical narratives are the most
manifest layer of this framing. The story about the people who built a historical edifice;
the tale that explains the origins of the ritual; the research report about the identity of the
people who left their pots and bones in an archaeological site: these are the narratives
through which objects, sites and practices are singled out as particularly relevant to the
identity of the group. More often than not, these narratives already contain the outline as
to whom this heritage belongs (and consequently, who cannot make such claims).
In plural societies, such as the ones under study in our project, historical narratives
are as much subject to contestation as the heritage forms they frame; and they are
therefore as much depending on ‘authenticating strategies’ and an ‘aesthetics of
persuasion’ as the heritage forms we have been discussing thus far. We should therefore
ask: How exactly should we conceive of the relation between historical narratives and the
objects, sites and practices they frame? What do narratives bring out in objects, sites and
practices, and vice versa, what do objects, sites and practices bring out in narratives?
What kind of historical narratives are persuasive and why? In what way are the addressees
interpellated by the historical narratives that frame heritage forms?
Important as historical narratives may be, the presence of the past can never be
reduced to being conveyed through the registers of spoken or written language, and the
historical awareness thus instilled in the minds of people. The past is present as a
thoroughly material legacy: ruins, withered surfaces, stony remains are ever so many
traces of times-gone-by (thus complicating every conservation effort that might undo the
coating of tarnish that history has left). The past has marked the organisation of space:
imposing grids and patterns; defining centres, peripheries and no-go-areas; subjecting
people to a structuring that remains in place long after anyone is able to narrate what
these histories of place were. The past is embodied: residues of the past live on in the
habitus – history turned into ‘second nature’, as Pierre Bourdieu would have it – and in
the sensorium, which is able to bring back long forgotten memories. The past is
encountered in silences and absences, testimonies to the impossibility of the laws of
sense-making that dominate historical narratives. The past pervades the do’s and don’ts of
the present as ‘implicit social knowledge’ – the knowing that ‘comes without saying
because it goes without saying’. Or it may manifest itself in the present in such forms as
the spirits of long deceased ancestors or ‘evil winds’. A study of these more latent forms

3. of history, while less readily available for empirical research, ought to be part and parcel
of any attempt to understand the appeal – or lack thereof – of particular heritage forms.
The question to be addressed here is: what is the past when studied and discussed as
(what Birgit Meyer would call) a ‘sensational form’?
Last but not least, we want to suggest that an understanding of the appeal of
heritage forms requires a closer look at the dialectical relationship between ‘history’ and
‘memory’: the way these two dimensions of recollecting the past reconfirm and/or
destabilize each other. Clearly, histories that are articulated in (and acknowledged by)
heritage narratives, forms and practices are in constant dialogue with people’s memories
of their own past. While remembering the past is a thoroughly social process – what one
is prone to remember or to forget is very much subject to available narrations of history
and heritage forms -- memories may also contradict and destabilize these dominant
histories. One might thus ask: what does a particular narration of the history of slavery
bring to the black woman who contemplates her own life as a maid, and vice versa, how
do her personal recollections impact on her understanding of the history of slavery? In
what way – if it all – do visitors to an apartheid commemoration site in South Africa use
their own recollections of injustice, suppression and discrimination to animate the
narration of history that this place presents (or reject it). In brief: how does heritage
resonate – or fails to do so – with the experiential histories of the people that are being
addressed?
To state that these questions about ‘history’ as a sensational form requires full attention
to the political is to state the obvious: the configurations of power within which heritage
dynamics occur, as well as the power-play between authenticators (institutions and actors
endowed with the power to authenticate) and their audiences (with their own resources
to resist or re-encode the definitions of which they are objects) need to be taken into
account in every analytical move. The proposal to understand history as a ‘sensational
form’, however, brings a new urgency to issues of power. If authenticities – as we have
maintained -- are in the plural, then what kind of knowledge do authenticators need to
persuade the people they address? If heritage perceptions are inextricably linked to
embodied dispositions and memory; if ‘de-codings’ and ‘re-encodings’ are operative at
every level of heritage dynamics, then what is in fact the power of definition? We could
ask here how, in fact, the requirements of authentication – i.e. the need to be persuasive
-- reconfigures the power arrangements that produce histories.
Salvador da Bahia, where the conference will be held, is a place where all of these issues
are immediately relevant. At present, the ‘history of black people in Brazil’ is a hot issue,
now that the government has ordered it to become an obligatory part of the national
curriculum: many groups are accessing this field, bringing with them all kinds of ideas as
to what constitutes ‘the history of black people’. The history of blacks in the fight for
abolition is being highlighted, as well as the contributions of black people to Brazilian
society and culture. Much attention is given to the formation of maroon communities
(quilombos), and the recollection of ‘quilombo memories’ has in fact triggered the

4. emergence of new ‘ethnic’ groups (quilombolas). Other contemporary pleas for rights (to
land, education and work, for instance) are also founded on counter-hegemonic historical
narratives, aimed at ‘repairing’ historical injustice. Beyond the African legacy in Bahia,
Bahia’s indigenous peoples have been contesting the influential historical narratives that
dominated the recent commemoration of 500 years Brazil. Rejecting the representation
of the ‘birth of the nation’ as the ‘discovery’ of a new land, leading into a symbiotic
merge between the haulers of Christianity and civilization and the noble savages, they seek
public acknowledgement for a narrative centered on invasion, brutality and mass
destruction.
Where it concerns cultural heritage ‘proper’, local experts have been talking
about a ‘heritage craze’, with ever more groups making claims to have their cultural and
religious legacy recognized as ‘heritage’; ever more definitions of what counts as
heritage; ever more contestations occurring over the reality of the past in the present.
‘Aesthetic value’ and ‘artistic exceptionality’ still seem to be exclusively ascribed to the
Luso-Brazilian legacy, while the value attributed to Afro-Brazilian objects and sites is still
mostly ‘ethnographic’. However, in Bahia – as elsewhere in the world – the emergence
and consolidation of the category ‘intangible heritage’ has opened up avenues for groups
who were previously dispossessed of ‘heritage capital’, and can now claim the
patrimonialization of their cultural assets. Thus, in the case of ‘black culture’, the great
majority of the ‘assets’ that have been entitled as national heritage are intangible.
Interestingly, this has also meant that the notion of heritage has increasingly been applied
to people, rather than to sites or objects.
Finally, Afro-Brazilian religions have become a privileged arena for contestations
over heritage, and particular narrations of the past are mobilized in order to acquire
official recognition. The narration of individual trajectories, which inscribe people in a
lineage and a ‘nation’, are set to organize the past and adjust it to official expectations on
authenticity. On the other hand, the definitions of authenticity are also being disputed
and there is a permanent effort made by candomblé people to impose their own
understandings of history and heritage, so as to be included in the highly selective heritage
roll. Similar observations can be made where it concerns indigenous groups in Bahia:
Tupinambá indians, who were held to be ‘extinct’, or Pataxó indians, who were deemed
‘acculturated’ by consecrated ethnological canons, have been (re)emerging in the public
arena, persuasively asserting their cultural and genealogical linkages with their ‘pre-
contact’ ancestors through archeological objects found in their lands, family memories of
their ‘wild kin’, and a sophisticated use of bodily aesthetics.
We will make sure that a number of presentations will address the Bahian and Brazilian
situation, but we urge presenters to bring in findings from their own research fields, as it
is exactly the comparison of similar processes in different worlds that will trigger new
ways of thinking. The conference will have the format of a workshop, and also includes
excursions prior to and after our meetings.

5. If you are interested in participating in the conference, please let us know as soon as
possible, preferably with a provisional title of your paper, or an indication what issue
your contribution might address. Please send your reply to:
Mattijs van de Port: m.p.j.vandeport@uva.nl
Maria Paula Adinolfi: paulaadinolfi@yahoo.com
***
This is the third conference organized within the framework of our research project “Heritage
Dynamics: Politics of Authentication and Aesthetics of Persuasion in Ghana, South Africa, Brazil
and the Netherlands.” In this research project, cultural heritage is taken to be the material and
immaterial legacy of a group or a nation, its sacrosanct performances and canons of cultural truth.
In four case studies we will investigate the processes that make cultural heritage a truthful, embodied
source of identity in a rapidly changing world.