ABSTRACT
By critically examining the impact of culture on development practices and encounters as manifested in the four Indigenous cultural villages in Malaysia, Staging Indigenous Heritage has shown how community-based cultural projects often come to be interwoven with the politics of brokerage and representation that entrenches a structural relationship that breeds Indigenous people’s reliance on these broker figures. It proposes that a starting point for UNESCO, international aid agencies, national governments, and museum institutions wishing to adopt ‘culture for development’ as a developmental strategy is to recognise the impacts of brokerage and the contradictory dualism of culture, and particularly Indigeneity, on developmental initiatives. This will open up opportunities for refining the implementation of development initiatives to better achieve their intended outcomes of improving the well-being of marginalised groups.
