Producing the Present: History as Heritage in Post-War Patriotic Sri Lanka

| by Nira Wickramasinghe

ICES Research Paper

The state – actually a shifting complex of peoples and roles…

Herzfeld (1997: 5)

Introduction

( August 20, 2012, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Walter Benjamin warned against the ‘appreciation of heritage’, describing it as a greater ‘catastrophe’ than indifference or disregard (Mathur 2007: 168). Indeed, heritage can be considered an essentially present-centred cultural practice and an instrument of cultural power.

It is as much about the production of the present as it is about the reproduction of a past. The changing fortunes and popularity of places and sites indicate that no site is inherently valuable as heritage. There is therefore no heritage per se and all heritage, as Laurajane Smith argues, is intangible (2006: 3). What make sites valuable are the present-day cultural processes and activities that are undertaken around them. It is through these constitutive cultural processes that things and places are identified as possessing meaning and value. As we will see in the case of post-civil war Sri Lanka, the choice in valorisation reflects contemporary cultural and social values, debates and aspirations (Smith 2006: 3).

What then is the hegemonic discourse of heritage “which acts to constitute the way we think, talk and write about heritage”? (Smith 2006: 11). This paper will explore the way this discourse has evolved in a post-war situation and the extent to which it has validated a set of practices and performances that inhabit popular, expert and state constructions of heritage.

For the purpose of clarity, and although I recognise that this formulation does not sufficiently take into account overlapping trajectories, I would like to argue that there are at least two main routes to the past: history and heritage, which share many commonalities but differ in a fundamental way. The purpose is not to idealise history as the true, pure method of inquiry and exposition of the past.

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