Mourning, reconstruction, and the future after heritage catastrophes: A comparative social science perspective agenda

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The Notre-Dame de Paris fire offers anthropologists in the field of critical heritage studies a rich opportunity for fieldwork and conceptual innovation. This paper examines the social repercussions of a monument's destruction, ranging from emotional responses and public involvement to local and global consequences. The paper also includes the project lines of a broader comparative survey on reactions to the destruction of cultural heritage. A team of social scientists created a comparative grid in order to describe and analyze a series of case studies: Notre-Dame de Paris (France, fire in 2019), the National Museum (Brazil, fire in 2018), Notre-Dame de la Merci (France, fire in 2017), and Coventry Cathedral (UK, bombed in 1940 during WWII).The comparative grid is as follows:- Practices and Reactions: Emotion and Mobilization RegimesHeritage disasters provoke a wide range of privately and collectively expressed reactions that frame these events as a social construction. How do citizens and institutions navigate the outpouring of emotion elicited by the destruction of a monument?- Consequences: The Nature of Heritage Items and Their Social ImpactLaypersons and authorities assign different meanings to heritage items according to their cultural and political significance and material and intangible features. How does such representations of a ravaged monument influence its reconstruction process and future relevance?- The Social Fabrication of Memory and NarrativeThe destruction of a heritage object rapidly triggers a series of narratives, including legal documents and authorities’ statements, that constitute a textual memory of the disaster. What standards define catastrophe narratives, and what do their retellings of the event reveal or obscure?- Heritage in Crisis: Catastrophe as Social Construction of Heritage FragilityHeritage is by nature fragile and requires continuous preservation. How does the destruction of monuments galvanize collective representations of the endangerment of heritage?- Temporality and Spatiality: Catastrophe as an Event in Time and SpaceAlthough the destruction event is often short-lived and localized, it reveals enduring values and concepts of past and future, as well as geographic place. How are temporality and spatiality reimagined after the loss of a heritage object?- The Right to Heritage: Reconstruction, Citizenship, and Cultural PoliciesAlthough often conceptualized as isolated events, the destruction of heritage objects is deeply embedded in their economic, cultural, and social context. What do the destruction and reconstruction of heritage reveal about power dynamics and economic inequalities?- The Limits of Reflexivity: Researchers as Actors Facing the Politics of MourningAs researchers, balancing personal commitment with heritage and ethical scientific inquiry is crucial to sound analysis and to the validity of research results. How should scholars simultaneously manage the experience of and the study of emotional responses such as rage or grief?This paper illustrates these points using vignettes from selected case studies. The project is part of the working group EMOBI, a broader ethnographic project on collective emotions and mobilization following the Paris cathedral fire (social sciences working group of Chantier Scientifique Notre-Dame, supported by the CNRS and the Ministry of Culture). The goal is to provide a comparative study of the stakes and repercussions of devastated heritage.