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FRACTURED LANDSCAPES AND THE POLITICS OF SPACE : Remembrance and Memory in Nwadjahane (Southern Mozambique)
Author(s) -
Cruz M. Dores
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
museum anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.197
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1548-1379
pISSN - 0892-8339
DOI - 10.1111/muan.12244
Subject(s) - temporalities , contest , politics , exhibition , locale (computer software) , heterotopia (medicine) , materiality (auditing) , quake (natural phenomenon) , collective memory , history , anthropology , space (punctuation) , human settlement , archaeology , sociology , ethnology , media studies , aesthetics , art , political science , law , linguistics , philosophy , genetics , seismology , biology , computer science , geology , operating system
abstract Nwadjahane, a small village in southern Mozambique, is set apart from other settlements as the birthplace of Eduardo Mondlane, one of the nation's founding fathers. Declared a national heritage site and made into an open‐air museum, Nwadjahane has become a landscape where national and local memories are negotiated. Mondlane is at once a national hero celebrated with statues, exhibitions, and commemorations, as well as locally linked to ancestors and memorialized through ritual sites and sacred trees. I examine how diverse audiences engage, appropriate, and contest the different spaces of Nwadjahane: the village, the museum, the space of ancestors. Highlighting the fractured nature and the politics of this landscape, the tensions, contradictions, claims, and counterclaims made upon a single locale, I use Foucault's concept of heterotopia as an analytical tool to interrogate the juxtaposition of distinct spaces and temporalities, focusing particularly on local interpretations and the historical conditions that made Nwadjahane a national heritage site.