12 Sep 2025  |  Magnus Treiber, Semiarto Aji Purwanto, Geger Riyanto et al.

The Anthropology of Heritage

The anthropology of heritage critically explores how communities, institutions, and states create, negotiate, and mobilize meanings of the past in the present. It examines heritage not only as tangible sites or objects but also as social practices, contested memories, and living traditions that shape identities and power relations. This approach emphasizes ethnographic engagement with how people experience, reinterpret, and sometimes resist official narratives of heritage. By doing so, it opens up space to interrogate whose past is being preserved, who decides what counts as heritage, and how heritage becomes entangled in broader struggles for recognition, belonging, and justice.

This workshop invites scholars, students, activists, and observers to present their research projects that critically examine heritage, the politics of the past, and its materialities. Projects presented in this workshop will be discussed by Prof. Dr. Magnus Treiber (Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, LMU Munich) and Prof. Dr. Semiarto Aji Purwanto (Chair of Tradition and Indigeneity cluster at the Department of Anthropology, Universitas Indonesia).

This workshop is organized by the Department of Anthropology at Universitas Indonesia in response to the research project Markus Mailopu and the "II. Freiburg Moluccan Expedition".