Living in a World Heritage Site

Through a thick ethnography of the Fez medina in Morocco, a World Heritage site since 1981, Manon Istasse interrogates how human beings come to define houses as heritage. Istasse interrogates how heritage appears (or not) when inhabitants undertake construction and restoration projects in their homes, furnish and decorate their spaces, talk about their affective and sensual relations with houses, face conflicts in and about their houses, and more. Shedding light on the continuum between houses-as-dwellings and houses-as-heritage, the author establishes heritage as a trajectory: heritage as a quality results from a 'surplus of attention' and relates to nostalgia or to a feeling of threat, loss, and disappearance; to values related to purity, materiality, and time; and to actions of preservation and transmission. Living in a World Heritage site provides a grammar of heritage that will allow scholars to question key notions of temporality and nostalgia, the idea of culture, theimportance of experts, and moral principles in relation to heritage sites around the globe.

Examines the relationship of residents in the Fez medina to the medina as a world heritage site Presents an important perspective on heritage using an urban ethnographic approach Ties together ethnographic investigations from the perspectives of the residents themselves with theoretical notions and debates across Anthropology

Auteur

Manon Istasse is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie de Mondes Contemporains (LAMC) at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.

Contenu

Acknowledgements.- List of Abbreviations.- List of Pictures.- Chapter 1: Introduction.-Chapter 2: Fez.- Part I: Houses in Fez: A Materialist Approach.- Chapter 3: Undertaking Work in a House.- Chapter 4: Furnishing and Decorating a House.- Chapter 5: Intimacy, Hospitality and Tradition in Tourist Accommodation.- Part II: Attachment to Houses: Home and Heritage.- Chapter 6: Sensual, Affective, and Cognitive Relations with Houses.- Chapter 7: From Conflicts to the Attachment to Houses.- Part III: Heritage in Fez.- Chapter 8: Heritage: Forms, Grammar, and Circulation.- Chapter 9: Conclusion.- Glossary.- Index.