The notion of sustainability implies a concern with questions of time, and an ethics that transcends generations. Working from my disciplinary base in archaeology and African Studies, and taking points for orientation from the work of Latour, I develop some ideas around transgenerational time, the role of the ancestral dead, and the rights of future/ unborn generations. As a way of grounding this broad set of concerns, I talk about archaeology and cultural sustainability in the city of Cape Town, South Africa, where historical inequality collides with contemporary forces of colonial globality to produce an array of possibilities. I argue for the urgent necessity of a radical political/ ethics outside of, or after, modern/ colonial notions of time, personhood, nature and culture.
Nick Shepherd is Associate Professor of African Studies and Archaeology at the University of Cape Town, and Head of the African Studies Unit. He has been a Mandela Fellow at Harvard University, and visiting professor at Brown University and the University of Basel. He is joint Editor-in-Chief of the journal Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress.
Nick Shepherd works in the fields of critical heritage studies, archeology, postcolonial studies and urban studies. Recently he has taken interest in photography in connection with the history of the discipline of archeology. Sustainable heritage management would according to Shepherd mean to critically investigate the political and colonizing role of archeology and heritage managers in general and to develop new decolonized paths for all of us.
His works revolve around the politics of memory and identity often in an urban context. He is interested in the way in which archaeological sites, material cultures and human remains become points of mobilization and struggle in a subaltern politics of memory and identity. From the streets of downtown Manhattan, to post-apartheid Cape Town, to Guatemala City, such struggles are transforming worlds of practice in archaeology. Furthermore, he is concerned with elaborating the conceptual basis of de-colonial archaeology and re-thinking the tangled inheritance of archaeology, as a knowledge project in the twinned contexts of colonialism and modernity.
2015: Haber, Alejandro; Shepherd, Nick (eds.). After Ethics: ancestral voices and post-disciplinary worlds in archaeology. New York: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 978-1-4939-1688-7
2015: Shepherd, Nick. The Mirror in the Ground: archaeology, photography and the making of a disciplinary archive. Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers. ISBN 9-781868-426782
2008: Robins, Steven; Shepherd, Nick. New South African Keywords. Ohio: Ohio University Press. ISBN 9-780821-418680
2007:Murray, N., Shepher, N., Hall, M. Desire Lines; Space, memory and identity in the postapartheid city. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-203-79949-6
For a full list publication list see: https://uct.academia.edu/NickShepherd
