Birds' Nests, Heritage Trails and Shopping Malls: Nostalgia and Contested Heritage in Malacca (West Malaysia)

Abstract

This paper explores relations between Anthropology, Heritage and Cultural process in Malacca (West Malaysia). Historical references trace back the city’s origins to around 1403 A.C. Its growing importance in the network of trading activities in the Malay Archipelago made it fall under colonial rule of European powers. Malacca’s contemporary urban cartography still reveals the historic thickness of successive colonial occupations. In contemporary Malaysian society, this ‘colonial legacy’ has been at times, reformatted and re-imagined and contested, through heritage (and tourism) process. Since 2008, the city has also been listed as «World Heritage» town . Who regulates what heritage is has become more problematic and a site of symbolic contestation. Based in ethnographic research, this paper explores linkages between nostalgia and alternative notions of heritage. I explore local residents’ meanings ascribed to “heritage” (translatable as ‘warisan’, in bahasa melayu). Building upon Rosaldo’s (1989) notion of ‘imperialist nostalgia’ and Hertzfeld’s (2005) concept of ‘structural nostalgia’, I end by discussing the production and consumption of colonial nostalgia in contemporary times.