LIVING HERITAGE, INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE, AND CONSERVATION BEYOND THE OBJECT
Tara Sharma in conversation with Hanna B. Hölling, Samidha Pusalkar and Juliana Robles de la Pava.
As part of the ongoing conversations within the Critical Conservation project, on May 11, 2026, we had the pleasure of welcoming Tara Sharma, founder and director of the Jungwa Foundation, for an internal discussion on people-centred heritage conservation, indigenous knowledge systems, and the entanglements of cultural and ecological care.
Trained as a historian at Delhi University and active in the field of heritage conservation since 1994, Tara has worked with institutions including UNESCO, ICCROM, ICOMOS, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, INTACH, and the Namgyal Institute for Research on Ladakhi Art & Culture. Yet the trajectory of her work increasingly departs from conventional object-centred conservation frameworks and instead foregrounds conservation as a lived, community-based, ecological, and relational practice.
At the heart of the Jungwa Foundation’s work lies the conviction that nature and culture cannot be separated. The “nature-culture” approach developed by the Foundation builds on the understanding that ecosystems, cultural traditions, ritual life, and indigenous knowledge systems are deeply interconnected. Conservation, in this view, depends not only on scientific expertise but also on the continuity of traditional wisdom, spiritual relations to land, and forms of ecological knowledge embedded within local communities.
The Foundation, established in 2018 in Ladakh, seeks explicitly to break down the silos between natural and cultural conservation. Its projects address both tangible and intangible heritage while supporting local economies, climate resilience, ecological stewardship, and intergenerational transmission of knowledge.
Creation of Intricate kilkhor- Tibetan for “sacred circle” or mandala at Korzok Monastery (Tibetan for “sacred circle” or mandala). They are profound ritual arts, serving as temporary, highly detailed, and symbolic representations of the universe and the spiritual path to enlightenment. These mandalas are often created during special ceremonies, where prayers, chanting, and meditation are used to invite spiritual energy into the space. (Image source: https://www.jungwafoundation.org/heritage-conservation/)
During the discussion, Tara reflected on her earlier work with Buddhist temples, wall paintings, and historic architecture before describing the Foundation’s current projects in Ladakh. These include the mapping of cultural landscapes, heritage conservation, women’s weaving traditions, grazing systems, nomadic routes, water management practices, and indigenous navigation methods.
Particularly striking was her description of mapping projects developed in collaboration with nomadic communities. Rather than relying solely on GPS technologies or cartographic abstraction, these projects attempt to understand how landscapes are read and inhabited locally: through the colour and form of mountains, seasonal rhythms, pilgrimage paths, cheese-making cycles, and ecological indicators. The goal is not simply to document territory but to preserve forms of embodied knowledge that are rapidly disappearing under the pressures of climate change, tourism economies, state regulation, and socio-economic transformation.
Another major strand of the Foundation’s work involves oral histories and cosmological knowledge. Since 2012, Tara and her collaborators have been documenting indigenous systems of reading the night sky among nomadic Changpa people, otherwise named “People of the North.” Among them are, for instance, the Changpas of Korzok Tegazung from one of the largest nomadic communities, who move with their herds of yaks, sheep, and the prized pashmina goats across the high-altitude pastures. Their livelihood and knowledge differ from more widely known Tibetan cosmologies and are now being brought into government schools through films, exhibitions, and educational programmes. As Samidha Pusalkar noted during the discussion, such forms of dissemination may be more powerful and accessible than written academic narratives.
A central theme of the conversation concerned traditional knowledge systems as forms of conservation in their own right. Tara challenged the assumption, still dominant within many institutional frameworks, that Buddhist heritage objects must be removed from monasteries in order to be “properly” conserved. In many monastic contexts, sacred objects cannot simply be transferred to conservation laboratories or museum storage. Instead, Tara advocated training monks directly in conservation practices and recognising existing systems of care already embedded within monastic life. These systems emphasise the impermanence of objects and the creation of new ones through rituals, in a process that can be understood as transferring the “spirit” of an object from one form to another, rather than preserving the object itself.
If a historic site has survived for a thousand years, “there must have been a system in place that allowed it to endure,” she observed. However, under the influence of Western and internationalised models of conservation—shaped in large part by colonial histories—many in India have been led to overlook the value and significance of their own conservation practices and traditions (Pusalkar 2024).
This led to a broader reflection on restoration, authenticity, and continuity. Tara described criticism directed toward repainted monastery wall paintings that some conservators considered “over-retouched.” Yet within local traditions, repainting faded colours may itself constitute an act of continuity and respect for the original image and its ritual function (Sharma 2019). Here, conservation is not understood as freezing material fabric in time, but rather as sustaining the more multilayered and plurivocal meanings of the work.
Questions of coloniality and epistemic authority emerged repeatedly throughout the discussion. Samidha and Hanna Hölling raised the issue of why Western conservation models continue to dominate postcolonial contexts, while Juliana Robles de la Pava asked about the relationship between cultural conservation and ecological knowledge systems. Tara observed that many conservation methods are effectively “copy-pasted” from Western institutions without sufficient regard for local cosmologies or ritual practices.
“What are you conserving?” Tara asked repeatedly during the discussion. The material object alone? Or the ritual processes, systems of consecration, and living practices that give it meaning?
The discussion also highlighted tensions between state-led environmental conservation and indigenous ecological knowledge. Tara recounted conflicts between Changpas i.e. nomadic communities, and government authorities over access to protected landscapes, especially in the high-altitude nomadic landscapes of Korzok and Tegazung. Conservation policies rooted in Western sanctuary models often frame human activity as a threat to ecosystems, whereas local communities understand the landscape holistically, as a complex relation between water, grazing patterns, seasonal cycles, animals, and human livelihoods.
Tara connects these questions to broader debates within conservation theory. Addressed was the historical tendency of conservation to privilege ruins, monuments, and the preservation of physical fabric over living sites and continuously renewed environments. ICCROM’s work on living religious heritage and UNESCO’s attempts to bridge tangible and intangible heritage frameworks were discussed as important, though still partial, attempts to address these tensions (Alison Heritage and Copithorne 2018; G Wijesuriya and Lee 2017; G Wijesuriya 2015; G. S. Wijesuriya 2020; Gamini Wijesuriya and Sweet 2018; Gamini Wijesuriya and Lee 2017).
A particularly resonant moment emerged when Sharma recalled a local stakeholder involved in discussions on living religious heritage, stating simply: “We should listen to the monks.”
The statement encapsulated much of what the discussion ultimately revolved around: not simply the inclusion of local voices within existing conservation systems, but a more profound reconsideration of who produces conservation knowledge, whose expertise counts, and what conservation is actually trying to preserve. At the same time, the discussion also pointed implicitly to the fact that “community” itself cannot be understood as a singular or internally harmonious category. Conflicts over conservation knowledge and authority do not exist only between local communities and external institutional frameworks, but also within communities themselves. Hierarchies shaped by monastic seniority, caste, gender, class, or social status often determine whose voices are heard, whose interpretations are legitimised, and whose forms of knowledge remain marginalised. Recognising indigenous and local knowledge systems therefore also requires attention to internal structures of power and exclusion, rather than romanticising communities as unified entities.
The conversation also foregrounded how storytelling lies at the heart of conservation itself. Paying attention to local forms of knowledge means recognising that there are multiple ways of knowing, remembering, and preserving, without imposing hierarchies of who “knows best” what should be conserved or how. Oral traditions, ritual practices, seasonal movements, ecological observations, and embodied experiences are not secondary to conservation knowledge; they are among the very means through which heritage continues to live and endure.
The meeting left us with an urgent reminder that conservation cannot be reduced to the stabilisation of objects alone. It is equally about relationships: between people and landscapes, rituals and materials, ecological systems and cultural memory, continuity and transformation. Traditional knowledge systems are not supplements to conservation; they are themselves complex and historically grounded conservation practices.
Sharma’s reflections prompted broader questions about how certain forms of knowledge continue to survive despite the hegemony of dominant institutional ways of acting and knowing. Perhaps conservation might be reimagined not as the preservation of a fixed material reality, but rather as the renewal of a vital energy that allows particular forms of knowledge, relationships, and experiences to continue, transform, and be renewed across generations. Or, as the conversation repeatedly suggested, perhaps the question is not only how to conserve heritage, but how to conserve the worlds that make heritage meaningful in the first place.
References
Heritage, Alison, and Jennifer Copithorne, eds. 2018. Sharing Conservation Decisions Issues and Future Strategies. Rome: ICCROM.
Pusalkar, Samidha. 2024. “Navigating Living Heritage With Socio-Religious Values and Conservation Paradoxes.” Milan: Politecnico di Milano. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/404871150
Sharma, Tara. 2019. “The Paradox of Valuing the Invaluable: Managing Cultural in Heritage Places.” In Values in Heritage Management, edited by Erica Avrami, Susan Macdonald, Randall Mason, and David Myers, 1st ed., 186–98. Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, Los Angeles Getty Publications.
Wijesuriya, G. 2015. “Living Heritage.” In Sharing Conservation Decisions, edited by A Heritage and J Copithorne. Rome: ICCROM.
Wijesuriya, G, and S Lee, eds. 2017. Asian Buddhist Heritage: Conserving the Sacred. Seoul: ICCROM.
Wijesuriya, Gamini, and Sujeong Lee, eds. 2017. Asian Buddhist Heritage : Conserving the Sacred. Seoul: ICCROM.
Wijesuriya, Gamini, and Jonathan Sweet, eds. 2018. Revisiting Authenticity in the Asian Context ICCROM-CHA Conservation Forum Series. Rome : ICCROM.
Wijesuriya, GaminiCourt, Sarah, ed. 2020. Traditional Knowledge Systems and the Conservation and Management of Asia’s Heritage. Rome: ICCROM.
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