Presentations by Streams

The notion of indigenous heritage is one of those taken-for-granted concepts that is constantly encountered in anthropological literature but rarely subjected to critical reflection (Moore 2022). Indigenous heritage is entangled with a broader conceptualisation of heritage regimes which are ‘fundamentally material and emerge from the power relationship’ and affect the politics of cultural recognition (Geismar 2015: 72). The Russian state heritage regime is closely intervened with its nationality policy. Thus, 2022, officially proclaimed by president Putin as ‘the Year of the Cultural Heritage of the peoples of Russia,’ ended with the opening of the Imperial Hall in the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology (Kunstkamera) in St. Petersburg, celebrating the idea of a ‘multiethnic empire’ through particular objects (‘imperial gifts’). The ideology behind the production of the national regime of heritage becomes clearer when it is juxtaposed against indigenous understandings of heritage, which are encompassed into their systems of values and grounded on the fluid dynamics of interaction with meaningful objects. This panel proposes new ideas and forms of examining the concept of indigenous heritage in an attempt to challenge the dominant top-down conceptualisation of heritage in Russia and to overcome the spatial limitations of current research by including Siberian Studies. In particular, we focus on the category of objects associated with human-non-human interactions (mostly interactions with spirits, but not only) among Siberian and Arctic indigenous communities. This category comprises objects that are loaded with high cultural value, situated at the crossroads of contested discourses and narratives. We propose to look at these objects through shifting sets of relationships and contexts, including those of family, museum, memory, and imagination.