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"Rethinking Heritage in Precarious Times sets a fresh agenda for Heritage Studies by reflecting upon the unprecedented nature of the contemporary moment. In doing so, the volume also calls into question established ideas, ways of working, and understandings of the future. Presenting contributions by leading figures in the field of Heritage Studies, Indigenous scholars, and scholars from across the global north and global south, the volume engages with the most pressing issues of today. Considering the impact of climate change, chapters re-imagine museums for climate action, explore the notion of a world heritage for the Anthropocene, and reflect on heritage and posthumanism. Drawing inspiration from the global demonstrations against racism, police violence and authoritarianism, the book explores the notion of a people's heritage, draws on local and Indigenous conceptualizations to lay out a notion of heritage in the service of social justice and restitution, and details the precariousness of universities and heritage institutions. Analysing the ongoing impact of the coronavirus pandemic, chapters also explore the changing nature of life under lockdown, describe the effects on communities, and reflect on the ensuing transformations in heritage and conservation. Rethinking Heritage in Precarious Times demonstrates that we need the deep-time perspective that Heritage Studies offers, as well as the sense of a transgenerational conversation that engages past, present and future. It will be essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of heritage, anthropology, memory, history and geography"--

'Walking is the speed for noticing….' In 2014, I began convening walking seminars together with the researcher Christian Ernsten and the documentary photographer Dirk-Jan Visser. Each seminar involves a mix of scholars, artists, curators and activists and results in various work: journal articles, musical scores, photographic essays, and creative non-fiction. This chapter sets out the thinking behind the walking seminars, drawing on a variety of sources: recent interventions in the environmental humanities, decolonial thinking and practice, arts-based research methods and ideas around embodied research and the senses. Not least, it draws on the long history of writing about walking as a way through which to engage the world and intervene in social scenarios. As we enter the ambiguous new epoch of the Anthropocene, and as familiar landscapes change and degrade, we need—more than ever—to pay attention, to notice, to take care. For scholars, this arguably involves leaving the 'white cube' of the seminar room for more materially involved and implicated forms of engagement with our research subjects. The humble, everyday act of walking offers one route towards such modes of engagement.

Taking the events of Cape Town's "Day Zero" drought as a case study, this article examines the politics and poetics of water in the Anthropocene and the implications of Anthropogenic climate change for urban life. It argues that rather than being understood as an inert resource, fresh drinking water is a complex object constructed at the intersection between natural systems; cultural imaginaries; and social, political, and economic interests. The extraordinary events of Day Zero raised the specter of Mad Max–style water wars. They also led to the development of new forms of solidarity, with water acting as a social leveler. The article argues that events in Cape Town open a window onto the future, to the extent that they tell us something about what happens when the added stresses of climate change are mapped onto already-contested social and political situations. They also underline the precarious nature of many of our urban arrangements. This sense of the precarious is likely to extend beyond the case of Cape Town and to be an abiding feature of urban life as we journey deeper into the Anthropocene/Capitalocene.

What form do the current and future catastrophes of the Anthropocene take? Adapting a concept from Rob Nixon, this communication makes a case for the notion of slow catastrophes, whose unfolding in space and time is uneven and entangled. Taking the events of Cape Town's Day Zero drought as a case study, this paper examines the politics and poetics of water in the Anthropocene, and the implications of Anthropogenic climate change for urban life. It argues that rather than being understood as an inert resource, fresh drinking water is a complex object constructed at the intersection between natural systems, cultural imaginaries, and social, political and economic interests. The extraordinary events of Day Zero raised the specter of Mad Max-style water wars. They also led to the development of new forms of solidarity, with water acting as a social leveler. The paper argues that the events in Cape Town open a window onto the future, to the extent that it describes something about what happens when the added stresses of climate change are mapped onto already-contested social and political situations

▪ Abstract  "Africa is various," writes Kwame Anthony Appiah in defiance of the Eurocentric myth of a unitary and unchanging continent. The politics of archaeology in Africa has been no less marked by variety. Yet, underlying this multiplicity of historical experience are a number of common themes and ideas. This review traces the engagement between archaeology and politics in Africa through an exploration of these common themes: first, as a colonial science in the context of European conquest and the subjugation of African people and territories; second, in the context of colonial administration and the growth of settler populations; third, in the context of resistance to colonialism and a developing African nationalism; and fourth, in a postcolonial context, among whose challenges have been the growing illicit trade in antiquities originating in Africa, and (in the past two decades) the decline in direct funding for departments of archaeology in universities and museums.

Includes bibliographical references ; I take my lead from a paper by Bruce Trigger (1984) in which he divides the disciplinary field into three modes or forms of archaeology: a colonialist archaeology, a nationalist archaeology and an imperialist archaeology. He goes on to suggest (1990) that South African archaeology is the most colonialist archaeology of all. Trigger was writing at a point before the current political transformation in South Africa had emerged over the horizon of visibility. Writing somewhat later, and from the point of view of a Third World archaeologist, I ask: What would a post-colonial archaeology look like? In particular, what would it look like from the point of view of South Africa in the late 1990s?

While books on archaeological and anthropological ethics have proliferated in recent years, few attempt to move beyond a conventional discourse on ethics to consider how a discussion of the social and political implications of archaeological practice might be conceptualized differently. The conceptual ideas about ethics posited in this volume make it of interest to readers outside of the discipline; in fact, to anyone interested in contemporary debates around the possibilities and limitations of a discourse on ethics. The authors in this volume set out to do three things. The first is to track the historical development of a discussion around ethics, in tandem with the development and 'disciplining' of archaeology. The second is to examine the meanings, consequences and efficacies of a discourse on ethics in contemporary worlds of practice in archaeology. The third is to push beyond the language of ethics to consider other ways of framing a set of concerns around rights, accountabilities and meanings in relation to practitioners, descendent and affected communities, sites, material cultures, the ancestors and so on. Nick Shepherdis Associate Professor of African Studies and Archaeology at the University of Cape Town and Head of the African Studies Unit. He was founding editor of the journal Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress. In 2004-5 he was based at Harvard University as a Mandela Fellow. In 2008 he was a Visiting Professor at Brown University, and in 2009 at the University of Basel. He has published widely on questions of archaeology and society in Africa and on questions of public history and heritage. His books include the volume Desire lines; space, memory and identity in the post-apartheid city (Routledge 2007, with Martin Hall and Noeleen Murray) and New South African keywords (Jacana Media-Ohio University Press, 2008, with Steven Robins).Alejandro Haberis Titular Professor at the Universidad Nacional de Catamarca and Independent Researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, San Fernando del Valle de Catamarca, Argentina. He has been researching the theoretical and methodological assumptions of the archaeological discipline from different approaches, including sociology, history and philosophy of archaeology. He is regionally specialized in the South Central Andes, and has conducted research in the same area for decades. He is particularly interested in challenging Western assumptions as codified within the archaeological discipline while developing wider conversations with local and Quechua-Aymara epistemes, within the poscolonial context of frontier expansion. His recent work develops a no-methodology as un-disciplined archaeology. He is co-editor of the Arqueología Suramericana - Arqueología Sul-Americana, published in Spanish and Portuguese. His recent books include Hacia una arqueología de las arqueologías sudamericanas (Uniandes, Bogotá, Colombia, 2004), Domesticidad e interacción en los Andes meridionales (Unicauca, Popayán, Colombia, 2008) and La casa, las cosas y los dioses (Encuentro/Humanidades, Córdoba/Catamarca, Argentina, 2012). Recent publications in the English language include papers on intercultural archaeology (World Archaeology 39:2, 2007), on animism and post-Western perspectives (Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19:3, 2009), on WAC and globalized science (with Nick Shepherd, Public Archaeology 10:2, 2011) and on Un-disciplining Archaeology (Archaeologies 8:1, 2012).

This volume offers a detailed exploration of coloniality in the discipline of linguistics, with case studies drawn from across the world. The chapters provide a nuanced account of the coloniality of linguistics at the level of knowledge and disciplinary practice, and expand their discussion to imagine a decolonial linguistics.