Historic Preservation

The John Moulton homestead, constructed in 1938, is one of four intact homesteads in the Mormon Row Historic District within Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. The homestead is a vernacular, two story wood frame structure finished with pink-painted cementitious stucco. The National Park Service (NPS) has passively preserved the structure since 1990 and it still maintains a high degree of integrity. The John Moulton Homestead is a popular tourist attraction for its accessibility and its unique paint color. At the present, however, the stucco exhibits severe cracking due to a number of causes, including a lack of designed expansion joints, poor installation, and uneven settlement, and an assumption is that it may pose a safety hazard if left untreated. The NPS would like to open the site to visitation while preserving the integrity of the structure and the stucco with minimal intervention. This paper focuses on the process of evaluating the condition of the historic cement stucco b...

The article engages with debates on the contemporary practice of ‘traditional’ regional Indian crafts and the disciplinary position of craft at a time when the roles traditionally assigned to academia, patrons (industry and craft non-governmental organizations [NGOs]) and craftspeople are in flux. The author takes the reader through a self-reflexive journey of unlearning based on her experiences as project researcher on an initiative to document traditional crafts in and around the Hampi World Heritage site. What began as an ‘objective’ attempt to present a comprehensive field-based project to document the living craft traditions of a region transformed into a discussion on the politics of research. The example of the Hampi project made it clear to the author that knowledge production is dialogic. ‘Field’, ‘place’ and ‘community’, whether project committee, general public or craftspeople (so-called objects of enquiry), can and do influence the parameters of research design. And this understanding leads to an acceptance on her part that, in turn, ‘researchers’ can only impact the field in a limited way. Consequently, a more useful role for herself and other communities, including craft NGOs, might be that of giving voice to the voiceless, in this instance, craftspeople. More significantly that the views and concerns of craftspeople do matter irrespective of whether they are in accord with the views of individuals, groups or communities that seek to support them, whether craft industry, patrons or researchers.

Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) is India’s premier national organization protecting and managing its built heritage. Over the years of working with the organization a number of challenges were observed towards efficient and effective site analysis and management and thus conservation. The authors considered these challenges as opportunities and with the aid of technology developed a Heritage Information Management Package (HIMP), which is being presented in this paper. Broadly, this innovation consists of purpose built tools layered over existing public domain GIS software and its successful application was recently demonstrated in a trial to the organisation.
While a number of technology solutions exist to aid and enhance visitor experience of built heritage, similar solutions to assist management are not available. In general, Regional Heads of organizations like the ASI rely heavily on Site Managers reports and a large number of trans-disciplinary documents to obtain required information.
HIMP as a practical innovation, based on professional experience, aims to overcome existing challenges in current organizational arrangements. It consists of specially developed tools layered over a GIS platform and provides information on both nature and type of works to be undertaken across nationally protected cultural heritage, especially applicable in complex sites. Implementation would result in single point information available on not just status and condition of the site but also works prioritization and nature of works.

This paper presents the results of the systematic survey undertaken in Hampi World Heritage site in Feb 2012 to map the locations of still existing craft clusters within this boundary. An attempt is now made to trace the linkages between craft cluster locations relative to the village planning and individual craft within the cluster and village. Field work commenced with Hampi urban core and was finally limited to the boundary of the World Heritage Site (including core and buffer zones) i.e. the extent of the Vijayanagara capital region-236 sq. km that includes Hampi and 28 revenue villages around it in a population of about 65,000. Besides geographically locating craft clusters; the survey also listed the crafts still practiced, the practitioners, community groups, tools and materials used. Of the 22 crafts listed through literature review, it was possible to locate 11 crafts within the study boundary and another 7 in the immediate vicinity. However, just one traditional craft cluster, in the true sense of the word, located within the boundary and one cluster outside the boundary were surveyed. Most studies in Hampi appear to focus on architectural typology, historical accounts, archaeology, ancient water systems and so on and not on living heritage. This approach is common for heritage sites in general. The present study is one of few to look into the living accounts rather than focus purely on vestiges of the past. Further the craft is not being studied in isolation, rather as part and parcel of its setting, be it tangible (craft cluster) or intangible (community).

This chapter seeks to examine the complex and contradictory processes of local heritage creation and governance at the UNESCO Cultural World Heritage (WH) Site of Hampi in Karnataka, India, through the lens of tourism. The site itself is a well-known cultural heritage destination on both national and international tourism circuits. However the nature of tourism at the site is complex; individuals and groups are difficult to fit into neat categories as, for example, religious, cultural, adventure or leisure tourists. This is because, although the site is officially promoted by local government (various authorities which manage the site) as ‘ruins’ and ‘monuments’, in reality it is much more than that. It is a combination of monuments (ASI 2011), archaeological park, cultural landscape (UNESCO 2008), living heritage (INTACH 2004) and metaphysical (Lambha 2007) or embodied space (Low 2003), all intersecting at one location . Accordingly, international and domestic tourists do not come here seeking only ‘ruins to sketch’ or ‘landscapes to photograph’ but for the mix of nature and culture that the site offers. There are also many regional visitors, mainly pilgrims or religious tourists, who can be seen at various locations on site throughout the year participating in a regular cycle of events. However, as far as local government is concerned, such regional visitors are not tourists; the ‘ideal tourist’, or ‘tourist’ per se, is one who comes, sees the ruins, photographs them and leaves ‘without causing any mess’. Such a definition excludes the majority of the site’s visitors and the reality of most parts of the site – an agricultural landscape that encompasses ruins, monuments, temples, fields, settlements, villages, people and their day-to-day life. Since 1982, when the ICOMOS expert team visited the site to review its WH inscription, there have been unsuccessful attempts to incorporate such daily activities into the site’s official designation (by changing it from group of monuments to cultural landscape: see Thakur (2007a and b)). I argue here that this lack of success stems from the particular construction of Hampi’s heritage, which serves certain vested interests within electoral, identity and cultural politics. In this chapter I present narratives and observations of different actors around the Jathre and Utsav. The former is the chariot festival of Virupaksha temple, one of the principal ‘living’ temple complexes on site. The event could be interpreted as an expression of the site’s ‘livingness’ or ‘intangibility’, but local government bodies deem it, and its visitors (mainly regional pilgrims), a hindrance to the ‘proper’ management of the site. The Utsav is a government sponsored mega cultural festival set ‘amidst the magnificent ruins of Hampi’, where the ‘ideal tourist’ is welcomed; in fact it is an orchestrated public performance ‘govern[ing] by spectacle’ (Harvey 2006), the portrayal of Hampi that most suits such a performance being ruins and grand monuments (see Guha-Thaukrta 2004, Singh 2004). The various observations and ethnographic vignettes presented here derive from fieldwork carried out between January 2016 and April 2017; each field period was planned around a cycle of major events at the site. It is part of my doctoral work that seeks to understand the ‘heritage idea’ among different individuals/groups, especially resident communities living in a particular cultural and geographical context. I build on this understanding to examine possible intersections, including convergences and/or divergences among different notions of ‘heritage’ and how they impinge on both place and people.

In this paper I examine the ‘heritage regime’ instituted at Hampi, Karnataka, India, consequent to its inscription as World Heritage, by analysing everyday material practices of conservation-management at the site through the lens of ‘care’. I argue that the regime is undoubtedly a bureaucracy as popularly imagined but of care premised on knowledge and not of apathy. I suggest that various on-going contestations amongst social actors is over the appropriateness of care, based on a particular visual aesthetic, which results in spatio-temporal material alienation of resident communities. Confusing consequence for cause, practice seeks to ‘engage’ with people whose alienation from ‘official’ heritage they are party to, which inevitably leading to everyday ‘heartbreak’ for experts, disillusionment among residents, and conflicted position for local heritage agencies, albeit unintentionally.

The co-authored chapter touches on some of the key challenges to site conservation-management of Hampi World Heritage Site, including, impractical labelling and categorisation and impact on resident communities and then sets outs a few key recommendations.

How do the seemingly oppositional constructs of conservation and development play out in particular locations, especially when seen from the standpoint of various social actors, including but not limited to, conservation experts and resident communities. What can such standpoints bring to the fairly large body of critical scholarship around the two constructs?
We address these questions in this special section commentary by reading three papers, that locate themselves in diverse natural and cultural conservation landscapes, through an alternative analytical framework (that we propose). The sites include - Rushikulya, Orissa, a globally significant site for the conservation of marine turtles; Nagarahole, in southern Karnataka, one of India’s most successful tiger reserves; and the Hampi region, northern Karnataka, where the archaeological remains of the medieval Vijayanagara Empire have been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS).
The ethnographic framing of the three papers enables us to move forward debates in theory and practice beyond reading conservation and development as discrete entities, which either come together or stand poles apart, as a result of specific geographic and socio-cultural push-pull. While we build our arguments we also trace a history of the dominant frameworks through which conservation has understood its relationship to development: first, inherently opposed to development, second, open to collaboration while maintaining its exclusive identity, and third, subsumed within development.
The papers (by Madhuri Ramesh, Krupa Rajangam and Priya Gupta) offer a useful point of entry for they share the critical perspective that both conservation and development are forms of intervention that are barely distinguishable for actors with relatively little power. Such communities are typically subject to displacement, for the greater good, either to meet conservation goals or development agendas.
In the commentary we synthesize three themes from the authors’ attempt to characterize this complex relationship at their respective field sites. The first has to do with the shared intent of both conservation and development versus the contingency of outcomes. This theme is interlinked with the second, the role of diverse social actors in conservation, each with differing and shifting geographical imaginaries of such landscapes, interests and aspirations that frequently transcend the development-conservation divide. The third theme has to do with the role of expertise and different kinds of knowledge that shape the relationships of diverse conservation actors and determine outcomes on the ground.
We offer our analyses not only to contribute to a more balanced theorization and critical scholarship but also as a matter of practical-political urgency—typically what resident communities want and what they represent for conservation, is most often always assumed, and never examined or inquired into.

In this article, I explore the complex trajectory of two bridges that were proposed for construction across the River Tungabhadra in the early 1990s at locations that now fall within the boundary of Hampi, a UNESCO Cultural World Heritage Site (WHS) in India. The proposed bridges were considered improper forms of infrastructure development in the visual context of a WHS, and the site was placed on the World Heritage in Danger List in the late 1990s. Popular media framed the controversy as a ‘classic clash’ between heritage and development where conservation goals and developmental needs opposed one another. Heritage experts, agencies, and activists read the crisis as one of ‘heritage or development’, normatively typecasting residents north of the river as ‘uneducated, ignorant locals’ wanting development at the cost of heritage. However, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival material covering nearly three decades, I demonstrate that residents wanted the bridges not as physical infrastructure towards some obscure development goals, but as the means to link their overlooked contributions to the founding of the Vijayanagara Empire, the capital region and its contemporary remaking as a WHS. In this instance, the binary opposition lay in the ‘expert gaze’, not in local discourses. It was experts, rather than ‘local people’, who saw conservation and development as inherently opposed to each other. I explicate how various views on what constitutes heritage and development intersect with each other, and suggest that dissonance need not be the inevitable result but may be built into the gaze of expertise.

In this article we argue for greater attention to the practice of (nature-culture) conservation as a specific form of intervention with implications for development. Outlining the dominant frameworks through which the often vexed relationship between conservation and development has been understood, the article offers an alternative analytical framework that is grounded in ethnographic attention to everyday practice. Applying this framework, the three papers in this special section examine conservation-development dilemmas at diverse conservation sites in India—Rushikulya, Orissa, a globally significant site for the conservation of marine turtles; Nagarahole, in southern Karnataka, one of India’s most successful tiger reserves; and the Hampi region, northern Karnataka, where the archaeological remains of the medieval Vijayanagara Empire have been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS). The papers reveal a relationship between conservation and development that is paradoxically...