Quilting Power: Mana, UNESCO and Spiritual Sovereignty in the Marquesas Islands. Issue 1 (14th March 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Donaldson, Emily C.
• Other Names: Le Meur Pierre‐Yves guestEditor.; Mawyer Alexander guestEditor.
• Is Part Of: Oceania. Volume 92:Issue 1(2022)
• Page Start: 31
• Page End: 50
• Publication Date: 2022-03-14
• Subjects: sovereignty -- heritage -- mana -- colonialism -- Indigenous peoples -- Marquesas Islands; Ethnology -- Periodicals; Ethnology -- Oceania -- Periodicals; Oceania -- Civilization -- Periodicals; 919
• DOI: 10.1002/ocea.5327
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0029-8077

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The Marquesas Islands were added to UNESCO's Tentative World Heritage List (WHL) in 1996. Twenty‐five years later, the project to join the coveted WHL continues, plagued by volatile politics and, more subtly, an underlying discomfort with the colonial past. This world heritage initiative highlights key cultural and political tensions between the Marquesas and the two much larger partners involved in the project: Tahiti and France. As a colonial territory of France and an outlying archipelago of French Polynesia, the Marquesas see WHL status as a step toward greater global recognition and power. Yet UNESCO's specific requirements for how heritage is defined, perceived, and promoted threaten to suppress more local, embodied, and relational understandings of Marquesan heritage, echoing long‐standing colonial patterns of social and religious oppression. In particular, the troubled relationship between Islanders and their past trivializes questions about whether to recognize colonial or Indigenous ruins, illustrating the lasting entanglement of these histories and the insidious workings of power across local, state and territorial scales. While the WHL initiative expresses both Indigenous and colonial ambitions, different parties are using the term 'heritage' as a political tool that either voices or, in some cases, silences, Indigenous interpretations. The underlying link between Marquesan heritage and agency points to the critical role of spiritual sovereignty in the tense and dynamic interplay of power in contemporary French Polynesia.