In her recent study of the heritage project that is contemporary New Orleans, anthropologist Shanon Dawdy has suggested that “[s]ociety presents itself simultaneously as a ruin and as a kind of playland” (2016, 147). This notion that the ruin is both a product of, and a basis for, heritage practice serves as a useful intervention into long-standing treatments of ruins as exotic, romantic, and awaiting the discovery, glorification, and preservation of those that might give them meaning. In the present essay, I further challenge heritage approaches to ruins through an examination of the ways in which they have been associated, in various Muslim cultural contexts, with a set of distinctly sentient, yet non-human actors, the jinn. This pairing between place and spirits has shaped long-standing affective responses and practical engagements between local (human) inhabitants and their archaeologically rich landscapes across the Middle East and North Africa. This essay examines how those engagements often push against contemporary discourses highlighting the sublime aspects of ruins and the quasi-sacred nature of heritage. To that end, the following guiding questions structure my contribution: Can contemporary heritage discourses accommodate practices in which humans share control and ownership of the material past with spectral others? How might we reframe the mandate to preserve such ruins in light of alternative perspectives that mark these sites as sinister, and/or meaningful, precisely because of their ruination? Can universalizing heritage discourses accommodate practices that derive value from the material past without also subscribing to explicit preservationist goals? Such questions offer an opportunity to consider the inclusion of the Unseen, and perhaps others, whose perspectives have gone unrecognized, within professional heritage management and its hermeneutics of the past.

中文翻译：

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遗产之魂，遗迹之幽灵：与精灵合作保护过去

在她最近对当代新奥尔良遗产项目的研究中，人类学家 Shanon Dawdy 建议“[s]ociety 同时将自己呈现为废墟和游乐场”（2016，147）。废墟既是遗产实践的产物，也是遗产实践的基础，这一概念可以有效地干预长期以来对废墟的处理，将其视为异国情调的、浪漫的，并等待发现、美化和保护那些可能给予它们的东西意义。在本文中，我通过研究在各种穆斯林文化背景下将遗址与一组明显有知觉但非人类的演员——精灵——联系起来的方式，进一步挑战了遗址的遗产方法。地方和精神之间的这种配对形成了当地（人类）居民与其在中东和北非考古丰富的景观之间长期存在的情感反应和实际接触。这篇文章探讨了这些参与如何经常与强调废墟的崇高方面和遗产的准神圣性质的当代话语相抵触。为此，以下指导性问题构成了我的贡献：当代遗产话语能否适应人类与幽灵般的他人分享对过去材料的控制和所有权的实践？鉴于将这些遗址标记为险恶和/或有意义的其他观点，我们如何重新制定保护这些遗址的任务，正是因为他们的毁灭？普遍化的遗产话语是否可以适应从物质过去中获得价值的实践，而又不支持明确的保护主义目标？这些问题提供了一个机会，让我们有机会考虑将“未见者”，也许还有其他观点未被认可的人纳入专业遗产管理及其过去的解释学中。