The ALIGHT project will shed light on Antarctica's living heritage, building tools to promote the understanding of the continent's cultural diversity. Antarctica is the only place on Earth without a native human population, territorial demarcations, or urbanization. Human presence is historically recent, beginning approximately two centuries ago. Since 1960, the occupation of Antarctica by people has been officially regulated by the Antarctic Treaty to occur temporarily, by seasonal rotation, with a focus on scientific research activities, and conditioned to generate only minimal environmental impacts. Logistical cooperation between countries and the cohabitation of researchers, military, and technical professionals, then became determining factors for coexistence on Antarctic stations. Such factors contribute to the development of a unique set of practices, memories, and cultural expressions, not mentioned or included in discourses and inventories of global cultural heritage. But, considering all these particularities, after all, what kind of intangible heritage does Antarctica embody? To begin proposing solutions to this gap, we aim to collect and analyze data on the intersection of cultural and natural heritage in Antarctica, mapping the living heritage in the region and informing directions for future studies.

NaMoura takes Lisbon’s Mouraria as the prism through which to investigate under-re-searched entangled geographies of heritage and security in the urban world. How do heritage and security align and interact to inform the imagining and making of cities? The project addresses this question by a) revisiting archival material and scholarship on the neighbourhood in light of the above new research question; and b) researching ethnographically the discursive and material unfolding of heritage and security as it is experienced and made sense of by a variety of people. NaMoura tests and comple-ments theoretical intuitions and analytical lenses that emerged from the PI’s work in urban India on a differently southern empirical ground. Insights from Mouraria—an epitome of unsettling contemporary urban dynamics (e.g. migration, touristiGication, gentriGication, regeneration) in which both security and heritage play overlooked roles —will contribute to theorise heritage and security anew, as interconnected urban pro-cesses.

‘Security’ and ‘heritage’ constitute prominent but distinct research topics in anthropology. Scholars have demonstrated that security and heritage respectively are produced by historical, social and political contexts and forces. At the same time, both are individually productive of new socio-spatial formations, inasmuch as they both transform places and ways in which people relate to them. Their realms are deeply affective. Yet questions about the similar functioning of these two phenomena, and ways in which they may be co-produced and co-productive, remain to date almost unexplored. This project aims to unpack and theorise for the first time heritage and security as interconnected imaginaries and cross-fertilising processes that affect the everyday life of cities and citizens. It begins by undertaking an intensive anthropological analysis of a specific urban setting in north India—the historic centre of Varanasi/Banaras—where matters of security and heritage are pervasive. However, the wider aim of the project is to open up a new avenue of research and foster broader comparisons with other urban settings in South Asia and beyond.