ABSTRACT
Staging Indigenous Heritage offers a critique of the ‘culture for development’ discourse through an in-depth ethnographic study of four Indigenous cultural villages in Malaysia. Drawing on the politics of instrumentalisation as a conceptual framework, it argues that community-based cultural projects often come to be interwoven with the politics of brokerage and representation that cultivate and perpetuate a culture of dependency between the brokers managing these cultural villages and the local communities that these projects seek to support, leading to the marginalisation of these communities. It thus calls for reconsideration of how the wider discourses on ‘culture for development’ can be operationalised by UNESCO, international aid agencies, national governments, and museum institutions, without reproducing the cultures of dependency that lead to the continued or further marginalisation of their intended beneficiaries. This introductory chapter outlines the key literature that this study engages with, and the wider academic and practical contribution it purports to make.
