Engagement, Gentrification, and the Neoliberal Hijacking of History

Abstract

Drawing primarily on fieldwork in Greece, Italy, and Thailand, I examine the use of historic conservation to justify gentrification. This commoditization of history expands into urban design a classification that serves the goals of neoliberal modernity. By thus refocusing the classic anthropological concern with taxonomy on the analysis of the bureaucratic production of everyday experience and knowledge, I explore a new global habitus in which dominant interpretations of history spatially reinforce current ideologies. Historic conservation often provides an excuse for intervention into urban life. In a revision of high modernism’s focus on science, logic, and efficiency, this trend invokes “the past.” But which past? The concept of “heritage” is grounded in culturally specific ideologies of kinship, residence, and property, but the universalization of the nation-state as a collectivity of similar subunits has given those concepts globally hegemonic power. In consequence, phenomena that governments treat as “merely” cultural or symbolic are not taken seriously as sources of poverty and subjection. By juxtaposing historic conservation and gentrification with a critique of the public management of knowledge, I thus sketch a critical trajectory for anthropological engagement in “the politics of mereness” by asking who defines what matters in residents’ lives.