The volume attempts to triangulate three vibrant discourses of our times: It combines postcolonial and decolonial readings of cultural conflicts with assessments of ecological dimensions of those conflicts, as well as their significance within discourses on natural and cultural world heritage. The examples from four continents range from the medieval Middle East - already shaken by a convergence of ecological and social disaster - to modern imaginary constructions of medieval Vikings, the persistence of Indigenous knowledge in the Arctic, literary poetics of patrimony, and the heritage politics of Mediterranean urban architecture. Authors ask which strategies societies in developing countries use to defend their cultural and ecological uniqueness and integrity while being penetrated by environmental hazards and hegemonizing "Western" forms of heritage culture; or how western societies construct their own past in ways that are sometimes reminiscent of traditional imaginations of a pre-modern past, petrified eternally in an "ideal" moment of time. Colonial and historical forms of "heritagization" of human and non-human environments, the essays show, answer to pressing emotional needs for a sense of stability. But the desire for nostalgia, frequently commodified, tends to collide with the similarly pressing need for political and economic survival in a rapidly changing world and in the face of accelerating extraction practices. Without being able to solve this dilemma, the volume makes an interdisciplinary contribution to taking intellectual stake of the asymmetrical politics and poetics of heritage and collective cultural memory.

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Gesa Mackenthun is Professor of American Studies at Rostock University, Germany. Her publications include Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature (2004), Metaphors of Dispossession. American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492-1637 (1997), and Sea Changes. Historicizing the Ocean (co-edited with Bernhard Klein, 2004). In 2006, she founded the graduate school "Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship" at Rostock University (German Research Foundation) and has co-edited seven research volumes on various aspects of this problematic (including Entangled Knowledge. Scientific Discourses and Cultural Difference, 2012, and Fugitive Knowledge, 2015). Her current research deals with nineteenth-century travel and archaeology and the scientific construction of American antiquity.

A strength of the volume is that it shows that the relationships between (de)colonialism, the environment and heritage are both fertile and fragile. Like the relationships between humans and nonhumans in indigenous traditions, they must be thoughtfully tended and cultivated. [...] The volume sheds light on the Complexity and richness of heritage and the environment; it raises many urgent questions and provides a few possible solutions. It will appeal to anthropologists, folklorists, sociologists, geographers, environmentalists and, indeed, to anyone interested in understanding our fluid, multicultural world. – Tiziana Soverino, in: Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 1/2019, S. 109f.