Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels: The Habous and the Olive Tree: Cultivating Heritage in Islamic Endowments

Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at Stanford University. She works on the archaeology of North Africa and how this material heritage is managed. Her dissertation research uses an analytical framework based on theories of value to document the recent emergence in North Africa of a transnational heritage management based on economic and universal values. She looks at how the construction of temporality in heritage management naturalizes inequalities by authorizing certain relationships and narratives at the expense of others, and she extends her value analysis temporally to the past 'management' of material heritage in North Africa.