Natural and cultural heritage have traditionally been conceptualized and managed as separate domains. However, growing recognition in law, policy, and practice suggests that sustainable and effective stewardship requires their integration. This article argues that Indonesian heritage governance systems, grounded in colonial dualism, reproduce a nature-culture divide that marginalizes Indonesian Indigenous epistemologies. Through a comparative analysis of Sangiran and Liang Bua, drawing on focus groups, interviews, and policy analysis, the article demonstrates how these dynamics operate in practice, showing how heritage meanings are negotiated across local communities, state institutions, and global heritage regimes. It shows that these negotiations are uneven, reflecting asymmetries in authority, control, and access to resources. Focusing on fossils as an analytically ambiguous category, the article illustrates how heritage boundaries are constructed differently across contexts. In Sangiran, fossil remains are integrated into locally meaningful historical narratives, while in Liang Bua, they are largely external to community identity yet embedded in political-economic expectations related to tourism, recognition, and resource access. These contrasts demonstrate that heritage categories do not emerge from intrinsic qualities but are produced through context-specific processes of interpretation shaped by governance structures. This article contributes therefore to critical heritage studies by demonstrating how heritage meaning making is shaped by governance structures that reproduce epistemic inequalities. Countering these enduring injustices requires not only conceptual change but also a redistribution of interpretive authority within institutional frameworks while advancing models of negotiated custodianship grounded in interpretive pluralism.
Smith et al. (Thu,) studied this question.