ABSTRACT
As a discipline that has traditionally been founded on concepts of culture and identity, anthropology has long been engaged in studying cultural objects and their relations with issues such as memory, identity and indigenous knowledge. Anthropology of heritage focuses on anthropological assessment of heritage, processes, the management of heritage and cultural resources and the identification and study of both material and intangible cultural resources as they relate to our ability to understand the relationships between the past and present. In anthropology, oral traditions were originally treated as objects to be collected; then attention shifted to trying to understand them with reference to the context in which they were told. In the 1880s, scholarship as understood to be an activity essentially conducted from the arm chair in the grand tradition of philology, where written documents provided the ultimate form of ‘truth’.
