Karma's father's cup

I’ve spent a bit of time recently thinking about how people relate to the spaces and ‘things’ of heritage: how they move their bodies, adjust their patterns of behaviour, and orient themselves in concert with their experiences. Academically, this thinking has been aided by the work of Nigel Thrift, Kathleen Stewart, Derek McCormack, and Teresa Brennan, particularly their discussions of the phenomenon of ‘affect’. This is a term that captures a range of forces in circulation, from the hand that rises in greeting – prematurely and in error – in response to a voice hailing us in a crowd to the way our bodies fire up with previous lessons learnt ‘and which push us in particular ways even before cognition begins to have its say’. In light of this thinking, I’ve found myself attempting to attune to the performative and embodied dimensions of heritage. Loosely latched across this interest can be read a concern for the emotional potentialities of heritage, both in terms of how they play out in personal ways of being as well as politically. This has meant thinking about heritage as something that habitual and familiar, something that interweaves with the world to form identities and a range of social, cultural, and political meanings. No long, I have learnt, can we allow our research and interpretation s to remain bound up solely with how we think about the heritage that surrounds us; instead, we are being pushed to notice our feelings and expressions, our bodily reactions as we respond to contexts, prompts, and familiarities. Indeed, we are being urged to give weight to objects and prepare ourselves for them to ‘answer back’.