ABSTRACT
This chapter draws from and expands on emerging work on the nature, value, and challenges relating to heritage and communities in Africa. The chapter analyses the persistent influence of the sacred, the spiritual, and the ancestral tropes in constructions of heritage, highlighting how the spiritual aspects related to sites, objects, and places influence heritage practices. Deployed by local communities, the trope of ancestors and spirituality take a central place in reformulating relationships within heritage practice. They radically challenge normative, local, and global heritage practices, and unsettle the epistemic privilege of heritage institutions whose disciplinary knowledge has always been seen as the sum total of ways of knowing. Constructed around the sacred and the spiritual, the resultant formulations of heritage, challenge the characterisations of heritage as overwhelmingly Eurocentric, universal, materialistic, or bureaucratic. They also demonstrate the diverse nature of the articulations of heritage, and its persistent role as a site for the (re)negotiation and creation of authority, as well as for challenging official and institutionalised notions and practices.
