Working with the Ancestors by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 5785717
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

“HERITAGE” IN TRANSLATION

In the cluttered, stuffy office of Fatu Hiva’s administrative chief, I perch on the edge of a metal seat, listening closely as Roberto Maraetaata’s soft but confident voice cuts through the sound of a nearby desk fan. Having spent the afternoon trying to get one of his two computers to work, he’s agreed to speak with me in these final hours of a long, warm workday. After chatting briefly, I ask him what the word heritage means to him. Following a short pause he replies: “Heritage is everything attached to a people, [or] a culture—it’s a culture. Heritage is the identity of a people. It’s a knowledge, a wealth. It is also a value that can be transmitted from generation to generation, because ‘heritage’ cannot have a meaning unless we can perpetuate it, [and] pass it on to subsequent generations” (August 29, 2013).

When I first began my fieldwork in the islands, I hoped to explore indigenous perspectives on what I knew as heritage and historic resources, as defined by UNESCO. These terminologies worked fairly smoothly during my research in Papeete, whose metropolitan character and bureaucracy link it firmly to international perspectives. Popular awareness of world heritage, in particular, was on the rise in the capital due to what were then concurrent World Heritage List nominations for Taputapuātea and the Marquesas. Discussion of the topic elsewhere in French Polynesia was much more limited, however, and when I reached the Marquesas, I realized I would need to change my language. Terms like heritage and historic resource are unfamiliar to many Marquesans (see appendix D, table 4), who have their own common understandings of ancestral objects, places, knowledge, and skills. This means that despite the commonalities across their translation, the actual interpretation of UNESCO’s terms is itself an illustration of power. In the context of global conservation initiatives, similar processes of translation have damaged local values as well as resources (see West 2005). Discussions of “heritage” in the Marquesas suggest that historic preservation initiatives carry the same risk.

The word heritage, or patrimoine,9 is new to most Marquesans and has largely been introduced in association with the UNESCO project. The question, “What does heritage mean to you?”10 therefore helped to reveal not only local knowledge of the term but familiarity with UNESCO.11 Of the 243 people I asked, more than 40 percent said they didn’t know, or were only vaguely familiar with, the term heritage (see appendix D, table 4). When asked to define it myself, I suggested that “heritage is what the ancestors left for the people of today, including paepae and ancient artifacts but also things like language, birds, trees, and fish.”12 I settled on this definition as an interpretation of UNESCO’s meaning that would also be highly “legible” to Marquesans.

One discussion in the tiny village of Hohoi illustrates how this introduction of authorized terms can destabilize local confidence and establish or reinforce hierarchies of power. Ingrid Hikutini (age 24) is Palimma’s local representative for Ua Pou and helped to translate Marquesan for my interview with her grandfather, Jean-Marie (age 73).

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