Vita sociale ed economia della visibilità dei monumenti

What we are experiencing today in the West, but also elsewhere, seems to be, on the one hand, the era of the end of monuments and, at the same time, that of a hypertrophic expansion of monumental space driven both by the aesthetic fascination for the ancient and the exotic that animates global cultural tourism and by the valorisation of ordinary life made possible by the dissemination of the anthropological notion of culture. In this context, what is meant by monument appears increasingly problematic and uncertain, insofar as if everything can become a monument, then nothing is one anymore. Precisely because of its uncertainty, this situation opens up the possibility of deconstructing the ‘monu­ ment’ as a notion and artefact, weakening its Eurocentrism in order to extend it to other cultural practices of inscribing time in space, the invisible in the visible, the past in the present. Intertwining theoretical reflection and ethnographic experience, with particular reference to the author’s research conducted between 2002 and 2015 in the Cameroonian kingdom of Bandjoun, the article investigates the social life and economy of the visibility of ‘monuments’ understood as chronotypes that articulate the relationships between life and death, the perishable and the durable, memory and oblivion, things and people, the human and the beyond­human. These are devices of power­knowledge which, at the very moment they affirm a certain order of the world, remind communities of the unresolved and encrusted knots of their relational life: unresolved conflicts, unacknowledged debts, unhealed wounds. Starting from these considerations, the fact that monuments can be attacked and destroyed should not be seen as an accident but as a constitutive part of their biography and social life, of the fragil­ ity linked to their materiality, of their being weapons and stakes in the conflicts that see them born and die.