While critical heritage studies have made significant strides in reimagining heritage beyond the nature–culture divide and the confines of the Anthropocene (Harrison and Sterling 2020; Bangstad and Pétursdóttir 2021), such dialogues have yet to fully take root in Southeast Asia. This roundtable calls for scholars to collectively address this lacuna, a call that is especially urgent as more-than-human dimensions of heritage are very central to many Southeast Asian lifeways. Bringing together empirical studies from Thailand, Cambodia, the Malay Peninsula, and the Indonesian archipelago, this roundtable seeks to propose pathways for exploring “heritage” beyond the Anthropocene—beyond human-centered, monument-focused frameworks – to foreground how animals, plants, spirits, and elemental forces act not merely as settings for heritage but as vital participants in heritage-making processes.
As roundtable participants explore how more-than-human-centred heritage in Southeast Asia unsettle universalist and anthropocentric frameworks in global heritage discourse, they localized practices threatened by rapid environmental and cultural change. Positioned within a moment of planetary precarity, as the accelerating impacts of climate change, extractive development, and ecological degradation are transforming both landscapes and lifeways across Southeast Asia, rethinking heritage has become an urgent task. Heritage practices and discourses do not only determine what kind of pasts are remembered; they also open up possible futures in and beyond the region. Compelled by the crises of the present, we approach heritage as a site reconsider the boundaries between the human and the non-human by inviting participants to ask whose heritage is sustained in the name of the Anthropocene, and how re-thinking Southeast Asian heritage might offer pathways toward more decolonial and more-than-human futures.