ABSTRACT
Before I elaborate on the exact focus and structure of my analysis of global heritage assemblages, let me first explain how I relate heritage practices to Paul Rabinow’s general notion of an anthropological problem. For Rabinow the question of “how to think about things human is a problem”.1 However, according to him “the form of the problemand therefore the practices that produce it and that it produces-has not always been the same”.2 Throughout the history of the human sciences there has never been any consensus about the principles, methods, and modes of specifying or verifying the problem of human thought and knowledge, nor has there ever been agreement on appropriate forms of narration. Though reasoned discourse or ‘logos’, as Rabinow calls it, has always been characterized by fundamental dissonance, “the hope for a positive science, or the end of metaphysics, or the hermeneutical closure of the bible or other authoritative texts, is like a cargo cult, which persists in the face of constant disappointment”.3 Against this background, Rabinow defines an “anthropological problem” as the apparently unavoidable fact that “anthropos is that being which suffers from too many logoi”; there are simply too many reasoned discourses for us to be able to latch on to one, let alone the right one.4
