**This event is open to those of the anthropology community ONLY**
This talk emerges from my dissertation and doctoral fieldwork on 19th and 20th century residential mansions called ‘havelis’ in the cultural belt of Shekhawati in Rajasthan, India. These buildings are of heritage interest in tourism and historic preservationist circles due to its architectural archetype and the elaborate frescoes adorning its walls. My work analyzes the practice of expertise and the different kinds of ownership exercised on these havelis as heritage objects, using the conceptual framework of ‘heritage afterlives’, previously used to understand the multilayered lives of institutionally recognized monuments in urban settings, beyond their archaeological and historical existence. The talk pushes the boundary on the applicability of this framework to non-institutionalized unprotected heritage in rural and provincial settings. It prompts us to study how the haveli, far from being a relic confined to a singular moment in time, is a living architecture that shifts form and meaning depending on who interacts with it, when, and for what purpose. As its life extends across temporal and social registers: it is lived, abandoned, revived, commodified, and reimagined in cycles that often overlap rather than succeed one another constituting the afterlife of heritage—not as a temporal closure, but as an enduring process of reanimation.
