Angela Labrador

Angela Labrador (Ph.D. 2013) entered the graduate program to study the archaeology of the American Northeast with Martin Wobst. She swiftly moved to embrace the lens of heritage. As she recalls, “I became more interested in questions about why people want to save things from the past, rather than in what really happened in the past.” Her dissertation, “Shared Heritage: An Anthropological Theory and Methodology for Assessing, Enhancing, and Communicating a Future-Oriented Social Ethic of Heritage Production” approached the protection of heritage as a social ethic. As she puts it, heritage “isn’t so much about the past, it’s what people today do to enact their vision for the future and what they want society to be.”

Labrador’s work at UMass led directly - and quickly - to her current work. While writing her dissertation, she was approached by Gustavo Araoz, a conservation architect and expert on heritage policy and practice, and Neil Silberman, a historian and heritage interpretation specialist, with an opportunity to put her interest in public heritage to work. With the support of the Organization of American States and the US State Department, the team developed a project that spans the English-speaking Caribbean with the aim of enhancing governments’ capacities to protect heritage across the region. Out of this collaboration, Araoz, Silberman, and Labrador formed a partnership in Coherit Associates, LLC (coherit.com) in June 2012.

At Coherit Associates, Labrador works to build and share capacity for community-based heritage projects, work she says was directly informed by her training at UMass. Her approach to the protection of heritage, she explains, is imbued with an emic perspective of value and authenticity, and relies on the application of qualitative research in the heritage field. Their work is diverse. Around the world and here in New England, Coherit provides support for cities and towns to document historic resources, develop sustainable tourism economies, and develop skill-building workshops to empower community members to identify and document places and traditions of significance to them.

The team continues their work in the Caribbean, now working in 13 different nations across the region. Coherit works with nations like Guyana, St. Lucia, and Jamaica to create sustainable heritage tourism endorsement programs using locally-determined heritage values.  Labrador has trained facilitators to carry out qualitative research, including focus groups, mobile oral histories, and photovoice research, to determine how citizens understand what is distinctive about their heritage and identity to create experiences and tourism brands rooted in local values.

Labrador also publishes for both academic and general audiences. Her co-edited volume (with Neil Silberman) The Oxford Handbook for Heritage Theory and Practice brings together a number of social science perspectives on the heritage field. She and Silberman are developing a second book for a more general audience, which will trace the past, present and future of the heritage field.

Angela Labrador is working to assemble a panel at next Fall’s Engaging Anthropology Conference. Stay tuned to hear more!