Towards a critical anthropology of the (de)creative turn in heritage

Abstract

Heritage processes are today increasingly entangled with multiple forms and discourses of creativity. Connections between creativity and heritage form part of a new consensual authorised discourse, where creativity and (heritage) entrepreneurship are projected as mutually beneficial in a win-win scenario, while co-existing with ever-more visible practices of destruction and loss. Challenging the celebratory narrative, the article unpacks the less visible political, economic, cultural and social processes underpinning the heritage–creativity nexus. This is necessary in order to confront and analyse the domination of space, place and history in the context of depoliticised neoliberal forms of governance. Juxtaposing the contradictions of authorised heritage discourse within the hegemonic politics and profitability in the neoliberal creative economy, we propose a critical anthropological approach centred around the decreativity of contemporary practice.

‘How well Your Majesty's new clothes look. Aren’t they becoming!’ He heard on all sides, ‘That pattern, so perfect! Those colors, so suitable! It is a magnificent outfit’.

The Emperor's New Clothes, Hans Christian Andersen ([1837] 1983)

Unpacking the creative turn

Heritage processes are today increasingly entangled with multiple forms and discourses of creativity. Connections between creativity and heritage form part of a new consensual discourse, where creativity and (heritage) entrepreneurship are projected as mutually beneficial. Never before have natural and cultural heritage and creativity been so present in the public imagery, nation-state politics and the creative economy while at the same time co-existing with ever-more visible practices of transformation, destruction and loss. Creativity has not only become the new buzzword in authorised heritage discourse (Smith, 2006), it has, in many respects, reshaped public policy frameworks and decision-making. A google Ngram search illustrates the largely exponential growth of linking heritage and creativity in the last 15 years. We argue that this connection spans all fields of heritage, whether framed as natural or cultural, intangible or tangible, landscapes or objects. What, then, is behind this growth in framing the world as ever-more creative and heritagised? The creative turn is sometimes presented as a depoliticised shift to arts, poetry and performance as the subject or field of activity by doing arts or otherwise being creative (Madge, 2014). At stake here, however, are a set of very different social, economic and political processes underpinning the creative move. Consider the drama of urban neighbourhoods demolished and beautified in the name of creative transformation (read destruction) and attractiveness (Harms, 2012). Such complexities have been addressed separately by several disciplinary perspectives, yet a critical theory of the heritage–creativity nexus remains in its initial stages.

If creativity, etymologically, is about bringing something into life, the heritage–creativity nexus can also be the very opposite; one of decline, stifling life and producing uniformisation. The very notion of “creative destruction” (Schumpeter, 2003 [1942]) encapsulates this dilemma. How then do we deal with the often-degraded nature of the ordinary, the hidden ‘out of site/sight’ places and the insignificance and displaceability of people within spaces of ‘creative’ heritage proliferation? Anthropological concepts and ethnographic perspicacity are well-positioned to unveil such contradictions and frictions. We might, for the sake of argument, even name this a focus on de-creativity in heritage in order to shift from win-win discourses to recognising (de)creative processes of destruction and rupture. Transmission may be blocked, creative practices devalued, even criminalised, while others are officialised. Recent analysis by the NGO Freemuse (2023), for example, details the systematic violations of artistic freedoms, attacks against artists and censorship across the world. In so many cases, creative actors with alternative visions are reduced to political opposition or otherwise de-created, ostracised and even dehumanised. The contrasts between these different realms of creativity are not accidental but firmly embedded within larger neoliberal processes shaping contemporary heritage and creativity dynamics. This depoliticised valorisation of certain elements obscures deepening neoliberal value politics excluding alternative potentialities. This enables a laissez-faire politics not only in terms of what is heralded as heritage, but also of what can be transformed into the normalised cultural production of neoliberal selves, values, societal engagements and practices. The neoliberal elephant in the room spurs ever-more diverse forms of heritage recognition within normalised landscapes of extraction, degradation and exclusion. Gentrified creative heritage spaces co-existing with degraded neighbourhoods have become a normalised part of urban landscapes. Shaped by asymmetrical political economies and the production of neoliberal subjectivities, these relationships depend on deepening practices of decreativity. Such practices range from material transformations such as demolishment and deforestation under the guise of rejuvenation to symbolic devaluation and denigration of citizenship and voice. The erasure of old neighbourhoods in the historic centre of Beijing and the displacement of traditional residents by gentrified creative clusters are a case in point. The growth of the creative cities network equally illustrates the emergence of a layer of official recognition, which systematically ignores, overshadows or obscures socio-spatial inequalities. This coincides with and is reinforced by how global policy guidance in the heritage field emphasises win-win scenarios combining the creative economy and heritage in hegemonic consensual politics across the world. As a consequence, a space of contradiction is maintained between heritage discourse and pressing societal challenges and planetary concerns. Global decision-making in the World Heritage context has, for example, overruled scientific advice and repeatedly fails to address human rights concerns (Larsen, 2023), climate change and mega-infrastructure pressures.

Genealogies

How do we address the imbrications of corporate players, techno-fixes and political power elites in contemporary depoliticised spectacles of creativity and heritage? Taking a step back to reflect on the genealogy of both concepts offers a good starting point. Just as the biblical nature and divine genealogy of ‘creation’ may be unpacked (Hartley et al., 2012: 66), the modernist narrative reconciliation of heritage, innovation and creativity is, today, ripe for interrogation. Whereas the romantic ideal stressed divine intervention, muses and Maecenas nourishing creativity, current creative conjunctions arguably rely on different flows and mechanisms of interpenetration between capital accumulation, creativity and the heritage sphere.

Both creativity and heritage have a long pedigree as cultural policy fields. ‘Culture is the fountain of our creativity and progress’, the Our Creative Diversity’s report noted in 1995, signalling a culture-ideological pitch from UNESCO constituents on the role of culture in development as a societal, economic and necessity for state crafting (UNESCO, 2020). Government-initiated cultural policies emphasising the benefits of creativity, particularly since the end of the twentieth century, include the rise of the creative industries aimed at creating, producing and commercialising creative content as goods or services. ¹ Almost two decades after the publication of The Rise of the Creative Class (Florida, 2002), the engineering, development and innovation of creative sites and workplaces are increasingly also present in the heritage field.

The link between heritage and creativity economy was not immediate, ² yet today plays a growing role (Keane, 2013; Keane, 2016; Galloway and Dunlop, 2007; Li, 2011; Fung, 2017). A wealth of discourses and practices around creative entrepreneurship, economies and heritage innovation today converge in what has been summarised as the ‘creative or orange economy seeking to unleash the productive potential of heritage, culture and creativity’ (Buitrago Restrepo and Duque Márquez, 2013). ³ The UN General Assembly even declared 2021 the ‘International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development’. Sponsored by Indonesia alongside Australia, China, India, Mongolia, Philippines and Thailand, this initiative highlighted a distinct Asia–Pacific perspective. Moreover, the text also reignited the globalised discursive linking of creativity, heritage and the economy by:

Recognizing that the creative economy, known as the “orange economy” in a number of countries, involves, inter alia, knowledge-based economic activities and the interplay between human creativity and ideas, knowledge and technology, as well as cultural values or artistic, cultural heritage and other individual or collective creative expressions. (United Nations, 2021: 2)

Such language is not merely policy rhetoric, but also reflects shifting investments, property relations and value transformation. The ‘creative orange economy’ involves a set of circulations and transformations of ideas into products and associated values for growth potential. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Creative Economy Outlook report (2018), for example, reveals vernaculars and categories of accounting adding economistic terms and metrics such as creative goods and services. This global market more than doubled between 2002 and 2015 (UNCTAD, 2018: 9). ⁴ Although cinema and music, from Nollywood in Nigeria to Kpop in Korea, occupy privileged positions in this economy, ⁵ heritage spaces and places are equally emerging as profitable fields of investment. For more than four decades, former industrial areas, national parks and neighbourhoods have been undergoing heritagisation, creative clustering and gentrification (Harvey, 2008; Smith, 1996). This process is now accelerating and making it evident that different social processes are at stake. Heritage tourism economies offer emblematic illustrations (Di Giovine, 2009) revealing intensified dynamics of dispossession, private profit capture and changing gazes co-existing with glossy visual representations; this has elsewhere been termed neo-aesthetics (Graezer Bideau and Larsen, 2023).

Heritage and neoliberal (de)creativity

This proliferation of new heritage economies, their narratives and ordering mediations is often underpinned by a political win-win language of innovation, entrepreneurialism and creative industry expansion. We suggest requalifying this creative turn as part of a broader neoliberal shift in the heritage field towards invisibilising underlying power relations, including privatisation and dispossession. The neoliberal turn shifts heritage and creativity from being fields under threat by markets, commodification and homogenisation to that of a mutually reinforcing relationship in a reconfigured authorised discourse.

Far too often, the branding of a new creative heritage economy coexists with and easily obscures processes of destruction, change and displacement. Whereas the triad of newness, value and utility is constantly evoked (Hartley et al., 2012: 67), contradictions ranging from its environmental dimensions (Oakley and Banks, 2020) and social inequalities to paradigmatic tensions between transformation and continuity are conveniently reconciled through confined heritage mechanisms (Larsen and Logan, 2018). Consider the spectacular transformation of urban skyscraper landscapes in hyper-capitalist oil cities of the Middle East (Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Doha) co-existing with heritage listed bazaars, mosques and vernacular housing. Another example would be the World Heritage listing of natural enigmatic sites in the Amazon, such as the Manu Biosphere Reserve in Peru, while deforestation and biodiversity loss continues (Junior et al., 2021). Critical authors have challenged the inscription of ethnic minority heritage in Vietnam, which co-exists with and even results in further appropriation and disconnection by state and market forces (Salemink, 2012, 2016) or the recognition of historical urban landscapes next to demolished traditional neighbourhoods in Beijing (Graezer Bideau and Yan, 2018).

Heritage and creativity are not merely mutually resonating and reinforcing forces of the cultural good but drivers of and subject to competition, contradiction and conflict. Creative practices and heritage phenomena are increasingly mobilised in distinct political and financialised ‘spectacular’ terrains. Gaston Gordillo observes how capitalism ‘rules through the production of spectacular places’ (2014: 81). This may leave ‘a path of destruction and vast fields of rubble’, as Harms noted in his ethnography of Ho Chi Minh City (2016: 4–5). Gordillo terms this ‘destructive production’, which we might here paraphrase and consider as destructive creativity in and of heritage.

Schumpeter, in 1943, considered creative destruction an ‘essential fact about capitalism’ (2003: 83), speaking of how the economic structure is revolutionised as old structures are destroyed. He characterised creative destruction as innovations in the manufacturing process that increase productivity, describing it as the ‘process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionises the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one’ (2003: 83). Heritage was in this line of thinking projected as the victim of creative destruction, bound to disappear.

The magic of the heritage–creativity win-win discourse seemingly resolves this dilemma by retaining the old in the new and vice-versa. However, as critical literature has amply demonstrated, the contradictions remain. David Harvey's critique of neoliberalism reminds us how such matters of creative destruction affect ‘not only … prior institutional frameworks and powers, but also … divisions of labor, social relations, welfare provisions, technological mixes, ways of life, attachments to the land, habits of the heart, ways of thought’ (2006: 145). Tackling the creative turn as a neoliberal shift thus involves situating the nexus within a broader historical process. Creative economies, start-ups and artist neighbourhoods do not appear from a tabula rasa but in many cities emerge alongside the dynamics of de-industrialisation, re-appropriation and gentrification of urban spaces. The creativity–heritage nexus as a public policy practice thus potentially reinforces and deepens such dynamics (Harvey, 2008).

Anthropological perspectives

Creativity in colonial and post-colonial anthropological gazes has ranged from the collection and museification of ‘primitive arts in civilized places’ (Price, 2001) to culturalist gazes of the other (Hall, 1992). Couched in vocabularies of difference, exoticism and the collective other, the anthropology of traditional creativity entailed objectified heritage subject to classification and scientific description ontologically different from the Renaissance ideal of ingenuity and individual creation. This gaze centred on (collective) repetition and tradition rather than (individual) innovation and rupture. It underlined creativity as collective cosmologies, crafts and artisan skills rather than technological innovation, individual creation, authorship and improvisation. If outputs were recognised as creative, agency was limited in a structural and hierarchical vision of radicalised, racialised and depersonalised other. Objects and rituals appeared without identifying craftsmen and women, authors or practitioners. Challenging this colonial legacy and subsequent modernist binaries (collective vs. individual subjectivities, practice vs. technology, handicrafts vs. arts), we acknowledge that both, nonetheless, entail forms of recognition, whether in terms of collective or individual creativity.

Indeed, dynamics of collective anonymisation are arguably also present in Western heritage sites, from distinct urban landscapes – such as Venice, to specific religious edifices – such as cathedrals. From another angle, heritage studies today often have a firm focus on how state or non-state actors creatively use ‘the past in the present’ for local political, economic and wider social agendas (Harrison, 2013). Contemporary phenomena include the role of heritage for cultural diplomacy, nation-building and domestic modernisation narratives (Winter, 2015). Convergences between heritage, culture and power are age-old, not least in the Asian context (see, e.g. Callahan, 2006; Graezer Bideau and Larsen, 2023).

Anthropology offers multiple perspectives to better capture contemporary de-creativity phenomena. First, we propose understanding heritage and creativity as total phenomena rather than pigeon-holing creativity and heritage within official discursive boundaries of aesthetics, innovation, design or archaeology. For example, a critical holistic anthropology would need to be able to capture Disneyfication (commodification, entertainment values and mass tourism) as part of the heritage process without simply relegating this to inauthentic ‘noise’.

Second, this also entails leaving behind a set of normative biases shaped by Western heritage notions. This includes the celebration – and simplification – of virtuous creative solutions, creative individuals and creative attitudes (Löfgren, 2001: 71). Critical heritage studies have long challenged the assumptions of late-modern and Western-centric gazes found in authorised heritage discourse (Smith, 2006: 17) and the risk of obscuring power relations and, as a consequence, even ‘suppressing creativity and innovation’ (Brumann, 2014: 174). Anthropological critiques of Euro-centric epistemologies (Winter, 2014) provide the foundations for a more inclusive approach of the creative turn.

Third, anthropologists generally emphasise the social context of creativity, not merely the ‘romantic ideologies’ of individual genius and ‘creativity as ex nihilo creation of products’ so present in Western cosmology (Wilf, 2014: 398). Herzfeld (1987) eloquently described this as the social poetics between convention and invention. A key characteristic of holism involves scrutinising the multiple discursive dimensions of heritage and creativity practices in terms of ‘the relationships of power they facilitate’ (Harrison, 2013: 5). This also entails exploring the cracks, divergences and practices of dissonance (Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996; Kisić, 2013) to capture what we propose as de-creativity.

Fourth, anthropology is arguably well-attuned to shed light on ordinary heritage creativity. Three decades ago, Rosaldo et al. located creative processes of ‘frolic, play and joking’ in the margins and interstitial zones (1993: 2) in reference to Victor Turner's work on play, liminality and performance: this ethnographic sensitivity was not merely about ‘stepping out of seriousness’ (1993: 7), but about taking ‘mundane everyday activities’ seriously (1993: 5). Indeed, anthropological attention has been paid to creative, transformative and improvisational forms of agency range from acts of playfulness (homo ludens) to wider poetics of social life (Herzfeld, 1987) and ‘practices of making’ (Ingold, 2013). Just as Arendt questioned the homo faber utilitarianism as the ‘degradation of all things into instrumental means’ (1958: 156), the anthropological perspective on creativity goes beyond acts of heritage engineering and tool-making. Indeed, the anthropology of homo creativus needs to capture a wider spectrum of both the social and the individual, the playful and the serious, the performative and the meaningful as well as juxtaposing construction and destruction. Where design thinking tends to singularise and decontextualise talent and individual genius as homo creativus, anthropology offers a contextual epistemology.

In sum, anthropology is well-suited to capture decreativity in its multiple dimensions. In contrast to the holy trinity of heritage, creativity and innovation personified by homo faber, the anthropological perspective offers a de-essentialised and less normative gaze of homo creativus. This allows the capture of diverse social poetics between convention and invention at various scales and from a diversity of stakeholders.

Normalising standards and heritage normativity

Liep considered creativity as an ‘activity that produces something new through the recombination and transformation of existing cultural practices or forms’ (2001: 2, italics added). Challenging the sanitised convergence of culture, heritage and creativity as a (unified) motor of development and change (Eriksen, 2012) requires situating the discursive production of heritage creativity and authenticity within wider regimes of state control, ⁶ censorship and constraint together with deepening entrepreneurialism and commodification of the other. Indeed, the creative industries can be described as ‘often routine, frequently standardised and generally derivative’ (Hartley et al., 2012: 68). Such routine depoliticised practices stand in stark contrast to the creative genius in the Renaissance sense. In fact, heritage studies often underline how heritagisation detaches places, objects and practices from everyday contexts, while formalising and homogenising them in order to respect universal heritage criteria. Recognition and protection of heritage diversity and creativity, in this sense, paradoxically requires some kind of homogenisation. We may here evoke Bohm's idea of creativity as the interplay between similar differences and different similarities Bohm's (1968). ⁷ In order for a given place, object or practice to become or remain recognised as heritage, it needs to fit existing criteria, while at the same time distinguishing itself as unique. A double process of uniformisation and singularisation is, in other words, required in the name of recognition. Such dynamics of normalisation prompt questions around the making or transformation of what, for whom and how of heritage creativity. It also draws attention to tensions between spaces and practices of individual creativity grounded in freedom of expression versus creativity as a corporate, state-driven and top-down defined normalising project. Investments in the creative economy and corporate or state-sanctioned cultural heritage promotion and diplomacy offer relevant illustrations. Consider, for example, the Korean or Japanese waves of promoting pop culture, music or entertainment interlinking nation branding, exports and global cultural diplomacy (Ryoo, 2009; Yano, 2013). As such practices of reification and commodification spread, they may coexist with narrow corporate, state-sanctioned practices of authorised cultural expression, control and censorship.

Consider also the growth of urban regeneration projects for promoting creative districts or clusters and valorising the creative class (Richards and Wilson, 2007). Such efforts, including global initiatives such as the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, ⁸ support officialised creative spaces for artists, performers, designers and innovators, yet also potentially introduce, deepen and police standardised and commodified practices of creativity, invisibilising and ruling out contradictions, alternative urban visions, critical authorship and social contestation (see, e.g. the critique by Peck, 2005 or Krätke, 2011).

Whether formalising practices of martial arts as Intangible Cultural Heritage (Su, 2016) or retrofitting natural diversity into universal criteria of outstanding universal natural World Heritage values (Larsen, 2018), both kinds of transformation build on new regulatory approaches, changing relationships and bureaucratised practices. Neoliberal governance is often described as a distinct deregulatory attack on state protagonism, liberating entrepreneurialism and asserting economic value metrics. In the heritage field, this project translates into new cultural commodities, the displacement of alternatives, gentrification and, even, over-tourism. From concrete materialities in West Africa (Choplin, 2023) to neoliberal tourism rationalities in Southeast Asia, contemporary scholarship points to the acute need for the critical analysis of such entrepreneurship, value creation and profit-making. This, in practice, prompts the need for further attention to the public policy frameworks exploring shifting values, legitimising de-creative interventions and neutralising shifting power (im)balances on the ground.

The dual process of creativity becoming heritage-oriented and heritage becoming creative, in other words, potentially normalises a slippery depoliticised terrain of ‘anything goes’. This involves a somewhat disguised conundrum of harmonised front-staged heritage creativity with less visible backstage dynamics potentially obscuring elite capture and the complicit state by pre-empting building blocks for alternative futures.

Neoliberal valorisation of heritage

[T]his creativity we award ourselves requires that we exploit the creativity of others. ln endlessly producing ‘products’ Western bourgeois culture is constructed as endlessly creative, a model that does not simply involve the permutations of products but the notion that production is also control, including control over the values given to things (Strathern, 1987).

Interrogating destruction, restoration and transformation of heritage has a long pedigree in heritage-related disciplines such as architecture, art history and archaeology. ⁹ There has long been a fine line – amply negotiated in heritage discourse – where creativity was no longer seen as a source of value but one of transgression and destruction. Whereas heritage discourse long challenged change, the creative turn, in turn, valorises it.

Holtorf sees a tension between theories perceiving heritage as ‘a non-renewable resource in need of protection’ vs. heritage as ‘frequently updated manifestations of changing perceptions of the past over time’ (2020: 277). He specifically argues that ‘the conservation of cultural heritage means to manage and testify to ongoing change, not to prevent it’ (2020: 279). Where narrow heritage gazes are easily caught within the discursive boundaries of protecting the authentic object, site or its designated qualities, anthropology insists upon the historical and social contexts. Interrogating the heritage–creativity nexus allows for new questions around value, authenticity and the market.

When Jonathan Friedman insisted that ‘the understanding of creativity must pass through the social and existential conditions that are its foundation’ (2001: 49), the neoliberal dimension is arguably a central piece of the current puzzle. Wilf, for example, associates the creative turn with the neo-liberal agency requiring subjects to ‘imagine and fashion their own future by engaging with risk and making decisions under conditions of increased uncertainty’ (2014: 407).

From cultural traditions to copy culture ¹⁰ and creative cities, Asia offers an emblematic region to study the massive investments and what, at first sight, might appear as ‘hypercreativity’, in the heritage field. Reflecting the entrepreneurial efforts of both private and public actors, the region accounts for almost half of this global creative economy – 228 billion USD out of 509 billion in 2015 (UNCTAD, 2018: 9). Heritage is increasingly part of the ‘soft infrastructure’ or domains of activity mobilised in this creative economy. The region encompasses the valorisation of millennia old practices of renovation to the mushrooming of heritage infrastructure, World Heritage site proliferation and newly formed massive entertainment complexes. ¹¹ The case in point here is that of heritage creativity as a ‘value-added industry’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1995: 373) integral to neoliberal governance, while repeatedly excluding alternative forms of valorisation. These include the domestication and instrumentalisation of heritage creativity with distinct market politics, privatised creative entrepreneurship and the heralding of individual action (see, also, Coombe, 2012). An interesting example concerns the reproducibility of Angkor Wat and its reconstitution in China as an entertainment park. Combining heritage creativity and entrepreneurship around heritage commodities, transferability of new heritage commodities relies on distinct neoliberal regulatory technologies and shifting social relationships in the heritage marketplace. Recent studies have precisely underlined the neoliberal normalised grab of culture, culture as resource (Yúdice, 2004) and ethnicity incorporated (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2009). What matters, from the neoliberal perspective, is not a matter of authentic attributes or situated context but one of creating experiential intensity and a willingness to buy and procure cultural consumption pleasure. This, in turn, obscures, or transforms, the boundaries between true and fake, new and imitation, singularisation and commensurability (Wilf, 2014). Such dynamics are particularly evident with the spectacular growth in and role played by technology in the proliferation of virtual voyages and depoliticised ‘heritage experiences’ across time and space.

Neoliberal use of digital technologies further blurs the boundaries between the material and immaterial. Indeed, technological innovation is even seen as a new way of (re)constituting heritage creatively (sometimes off-setting destruction elsewhere). No longer confined to intrinsic cultural significance, material protection and heritage values, the neoliberal project leads to detached, beautified and commodified places, objects and heritage practices ready for wider circulation and consumption. Country houses featured in TV exports ‘selling in more than 100 territories’, Branding Britain and the Creative Industries Sectors Deal underline ‘the essential role heritage plays in the success of the creative industries’ (The Heritage Alliance, 2020: 5). Low-hanging heritage fruits are repackaged by public private partnerships for creative experience economies and tourism development, while contested heritage is annulled and less emblematic sites neglected or simply devalorised. Heritage is also recycled in the gaming industry and 3D reconstructions for tourism. Bird, for example, speaks of the digital dispossession of Native Americans as ‘meaningful connections to land’ are lost in virtual translation (2021). Digital technology projects, in one sense, render the world more accessible but may also conversely render invisible or reproduce power geometries, social inequalities and even spatial conflicts. This leaves back stories of the decreativity, exclusion and destruction conspicuously absent or underreported, such as on-going territorial conflicts and land claims by Indigenous Peoples. As Belfiore notes, cultural value allocation cannot be separated from resource distribution reflecting sites of ‘tensions, struggles for power, and the scene of a complex politics of representation, identity, taste and class’ (2020: 394). In the arts sector in Beijing, for example, Ren and Sun underline how the ‘local state has extended its creative control over artists by using interlocking directorates’ (2012: 504). The authors argue that government officials thereby extend control over both cultural production and real estate development. Theorising the creative turn necessarily requires focussed attention to such neoliberal instrumentalities across different political contexts leading to new commodity forms and practices of accumulation.

Concluding remarks

‘But he hasn't got anything on!’ the whole town cried out at last. The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, ‘this procession has got to go on’. So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn’t there at all.

The Emperor's New Clothes, Hans Christian Andersen ([1837] 1983)

How to anthropologically theorise and problematise the discursive convergence between heritage-making and depoliticised creativity? Is creativity yet another add-on or fad to be added to the already loaded list of positives tagged on to heritage discourse (sustainable, community-based, multicultural, inclusive, creative)? In quoting Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes, we question the celebration of the heritage–creativity nexus as the novel panacea for heritage-making. This is not only of academic importance.

In contrast to this celebratory discourse, addressing the less visible political, economic, cultural and social dimensions of what we call de-creative agency is becoming urgent. Whereas homo creativus progresses steadily towards a brighter world in tandem with the economy, critical heritage studies have long highlighted the limited space to address questions of inequalities, conflict and friction illustrating the tensions between an ethics of probability and an ethics of potentiality (Appadurai, 2013 quoted by Ortner, 2016: 64–65).

Anthropology allows us to explicate this contradictory space, hegemonic politics and the uneven political economies involved in the ‘creative’ reappropriation of public space, memory and nature. The common absence of indigenous and local community voices in shaping heritage decision-making illustrates the corporate and state-driven mobilisation of the creative turn alongside the triumph of a normalised entrepreneurial market-gaze enhancing displacement, appropriation and capture.

Whereas creative design thinking tends to reiterate the idea of decontextual talent, individual genius as homo creativus, taking into account the creative class, contested identities and the wider political economy reveals the necessity to tackle neoliberal foundations of contemporary policy prescriptions head-on. We thus challenge the heritage–creativity nexus on at least two core accounts. First, the sanitised win-win discourse far too easily leads to the blind acceptance of corporate, state-sanctioned performance, economic value metrics and a narrow utilitarian gaze framed around the capitalisation of creativity. New heritage experiences are repackaged for cultural consumption with scant attention to the inequalities, displacements and frictions involved in or resulting from these transformations.

Second, building on increasingly normalised non-democratic governance of diversity, this process both invisibilises and neutralises alternative value projects, spatial dynamics and people replaced by new creative forms of cultural homogenisation. Such normalised anti-politics of creativity leaves limited space to rethink corporate state-driven frameworks and maintain space for alternatives and resistances. In response, not only the hegemonic dynamics, but also the subaltern voices and social struggles, need to be addressed head-on regarding the meaning and practices of heritage, creativity and cultural expressions.

Anthropological critique is today fundamental to democratise, problematise and even decolonise heritage policy and practice out of its corporate, state-sanctioned space in order to enable counter-discourse, dissonance and future imaginaries to take root. By highlighting the discursive regimes, politics and power asymmetries at stake in the creative turn, a historically oriented anthropology offers multiple openings to unmask political contradictions, de-creative practice and market conveniences.