ABSTRACT
Butler's chapter narrates the historical 'Westernization' of heritage memory and the challenges made to the so-called universal, foundational qualities of Greco-European memory and the Western, Classical, and canonical heritage genealogies as they are confronted by an 'othering' identified as an 'Africanist turn'. He proposes a critical reappraisal of alternative intellectual-operational 'performative moments' in the 'traditions' of African heritage. In his chapter on the Osun sacred grove in Osogbo (Nigeria), Peter Probst demonstrates how, under colonialism, the grove and its deities had become less central to Osogbo's religious life. This chapter shows how the revitalization of a sacred grove as heritage triggers the making of narratives that include those pasts in diverging imaginations of the future. To situate the current concern with the conservation of heritage, it begins by exploring the ideological origins that underlie the globalising aims of the UNESCO world heritage policy.
