Memories of Metolong: The challenges of archiving intangible heritage in development contexts

In 2012, two of the authors engaged in an Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) study as part of the Metolong Cultural Resource Management project, ahead of completion of the Metolong dam, western Lesotho. Focussing on aspects of living heritage that will be directly affected by the completion of the dam, the study revealed a number of intriguing conclusions, most notably that when it comes to the ICH of landscape, ICH is, in fact, far from intangible. This leads to a number of challenges when we consider the ethical imperative to archive the results of such studies. We oppose the notion that documenting ICH conveys materiality upon it and argue the contrary, that textual documentation of ICH in fact abstracts it from its inherent materiality in landscape. This, coupled with the obligation to provide an archive accessible to all sectors of the community, requires that the archiving and interpretation of such projects be achieved in a non- (or not solely) textual manner. In our work we made use of a number of non-textual recording techniques, such as GPS, mapping, and audio-visual documentation, and in this paper we consider other techniques in the creation of physical archives and interpretation methods that could enhance memories of Metolong. The loss of landscape and associated heritage is traumatic, particularly in a development context, where such loss may be sudden, and not necessarily desired by impacted communities: it is recognised that ICH recording can act as a mitigatory tool in allowing communities to retain some records of their lost heritage, but in this paper we argue that this is only the case where this leads to the creation of accessible archives, and that the achievement of this is an ethical imperative for heritage workers.