About the project
The primary purpose of the project is to explore at-risk heritage landscapes for the sustainable development and welfare of mountain communities in the HKH region and designed to facilitate and strengthen communities’ heritage identity and resilience in the face of shocks and rapid change due to disasters and climate change.
The Hindu-Kush-Himalaya (HKH) mountains are home to unique societies in terms of culture, heritage, biodiversity, environment and diverse terrain that is continuously transforming with the changing climate. Glacial systems are highly sensitive to variation in the climate and can result in catastrophic impacts for the ecosystem, biodiversity, socio-economic harmony of mountain communities and downstream population and resulting in devastating transformation of natural terrain and environment making these eco-systems very fragile.
This project has developed a Fragile Heritage Framework that enables local communities, heritage workers etc. to identify and document the risk to heritage landscapes (including heritage practices, processes and products) in any locality and create a database of heritage assets and places upon which relevant interventions can be designed for the recognition of the heritage in focus.
Sites
Kharmang Valley: Kharmang Valley is located in the vicinity of the regional centre of Skardu, on the banks of Indus river and named after the Khar (palace) and Mang (forts). The material heritage consists of unique architecture found in the remnants of forts and palaces, as well as vernacular dwellings. The immaterial heritage consists of practices and oral heritage that corresponds with the natural environment and landscape, which is rapidly changing due to effects of climate change.
Yasin Valley: Surrounded by a network of glaciers, it is strategically located and served as an ancient and important route between South and Central Asia. It connects with Wakhan-Pamir area on the North via Darkut pass, and Baba Ghundi on the east via Chilingi pass. Notable material heritage comprises 16TH CEN forts and megalithic stone circles along with vernacular abodes, while the immaterial heritage celebrates shamanism, and spirit beings that reside in glaciers untainted by human presence.
Kalash Valley: Located in the North-West of Pakistan, the rich living culture and heritage dating back to almost 3000 years of Kalasha religion is intact. The Kalasha built heritage such as temples, altars and graveyards are at risk of erasure due to frequent flooding and land erosion. The intangible heritage of the kalasha is linked to pastoralism and pastures which are also severely affected by climate change (intense shorter winters). Additionally, excessive and unplanned tourism is adversely affecting the living heritage of Kalasha.
Fragile heritage
Understanding risk and cultural heritage using focus group discussions on maps and geo-spatial datasets from the heritage mapping above to see what the community identifies as risks to cultural heritage, and their anticipations and propositions, patterns of resilience and their value in climate crisis. Engaging with our changing earth explores how the community and scientists tell material stories of the water, glaciers and landforms and how they correspond with local folklore and spirit beings across valleys of HKH.
Values
Mapping material vernacular and immaterial (practices, folklore) heritage through audio-visual stories and photo transects to produce ‘deep maps’ that are cosmopolitical giving a varied sense of attachment, belonging, abandonment and loss of heritage landscapes. Assets are given a value based on how the local communities affiliate with heritage.
Attachment Through tea sessions and listening to stories, we understand how communities nurture and maintain affiliations with objects, practices, stories and place. These connections may be spiritual, memorised, narrated and practiced in order to retain a sense of belonging.
Adaptation Through visual ethnography, oral and recorded history mapping and storytelling, this project explores alongside scientific data how climate change is modifying the heritage landscapes; geological terrain, material heritage (built environment) and the immaterial heritage (cultural and socio-economic practices) and the adaptation processes employed at both at landscape and human level.
Abandonment heritage that is left behind and forgotten. A few traces are left behind which indicate its once presence.
Cache a hidden or inaccessible storage place for valuables, lost but not forgotten. An auxiliary memory from which high-speed retrieval is possible. Heritage lives on in memory.
How we read the landscape
Cosmopolitical Maps By Zahra Hussain
Cosmopolitical maps are an attempt to recognise human and non-human entities and their potentially other worlds. Such maps explore and draw upon the vitality of matter, non-human and more than human entities and their capacity to organise, transgress, dis-mantle and negotiate forms of ordering the world. Cosmopolitical mapping is a process through which these potentially conflicting orderings are rendered visible. Cosmopolitical maps don’t possess a definite structure or visual identity, neither do they attempt to foreclose the mapped entity towards a unilateral narration or visualisation, rather they seek to explore interrelations, interdependencies, synergies and disjunction between multiple actors, entities and their worlds. By employing discursive and material techniques, this mapping process attempts to envision and compose common worlds by recognising entities and actors that are otherwise ignored, silenced, misrepresented in contemporary anthropocentric endeavours.
In so doing, they make visible alternative worlds, worlds that are at risk of erasure. This, at times requires befriending djinns and saints, or mad men and poets who roam the streets, or navigate traces and remnants in a landscape through stories, folklore and objects, and practices that shape landscapes in particular ways. These maps raise important questions with reference to which lives, landscapes,entities and ways of being in and navigating the world are considered legitimate (legal), sustainable and worthy of building a/the future with.
- I use the word compose – because it allows the possibility of de-composition and re-composition (Latour). Cosmopolitical mapping is a process that must open up the world as a problem rather than foreclose it towards a particular ordering (Stengers).
- contemporary epoch, where our social, cultural and economic lives and landscapes are overwhelmingly ordered and shaped by capitalist extractive models of value creation.
- Whose lives and ways of being endure, and which species, entities and forms of existences are allowed to sustain and remain in a future crafted by dominant and top-down imaginaries of development and progress.
Cosmopolitical mapping may be usefully employed in contexts and situations where an entity, its life or form is at stake; of losing its legitimacy, life, sustenance in face of a dominant power that seeks to erase, undermine or destabilise it.
Team
The team consists of those who have lived and navigated the mountain landscapes of Hindu Kush Himalaya region along with geographers, geologists, archaeologists, artists and architects.
- Mike Crang
- Zahra Hussain
- Somana Riaz
- Abdul Samad
- Kamran Rizvi
- Fatiha Hamid
- Yumna Sadiq
- Jaffar Ali
- Javed Iqbal
- Akram Hussain
