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An Introduction to Heritage in Action
Academics did not create heritage, but they disciplined it, so to speak, in the late 20 th century. Heritage was already happening in the context of multiculturalism and globalization as " people all over the world … turned to ethnic and cultural identity as a means of mobilizing themselves for the defense of their social and political-economic interests " (Turner, 1993, p. 423). It was also happening via the mechanisms of UNESCO's World Heritage List, which were beginning to operate as early as 1978, and as mass tourism opened up new horizons for that industry. Indeed, cultural heritage was – and is – on the move: heritage is in action. One clear demonstration of this is the " overproduction " of heritage. Whether it is the expansion of the World Heritage List (1,031 inscriptions as of 2015 with no end in sight/sites, if we may be permitted the pun), the proliferation of museums, individual and community heritagizing actions, business sector appropriations of heritage discourse and imagery, the new European Heritage Label, or heritage-justified internal and international ethnic strife—it seems that everything and anything is being declared, contested and/or performed as heritage. Moreover, heritage now travels with a mobile population – temporary, permanent and along a scale between those extremes – and it (re)creates and reconfigures itself in its destinations. Heritage is produced and mobilized by individuals and communities in any number of actions, including remembering, forgetting, generating, adapting and performing. Heritage shapes and reshapes people's sense of place, sense of belonging and cultural identities locally and nationally. Clearly, then, heritage does " work " (Smith, 2006). And as work, cultural heritage is a tool that is deployed broadly in society today. It is at work in indigenous and vernacular communities, in urban development and regeneration schemes, in expressions of community, in acts of memorialization and counteracts of forgetting, in museums and other spaces of representation, in tourism, in the offices of those making public policy and, all too frequently, in conflicts over identity and the goals of those politics of identification. Thus, heritage is not simply an inert " something " to be looked at, passively experienced or a point of entertainment; rather, it is always bringing the past into the present through historical contingency and strategic appropriations, deployments, redeployments, and the creation of connections and reconnections. It implicates how memory is produced, framed, articulated and inscribed upon spaces in a locale, across regions, nationally and, ultimately, transnationally. It enables us to critically engage with contemporary social and political issues of grand import while also being a familiar prop drawn upon to make sense of more mundane processes of negotiating self, place, home and community.
In dialogue with cultural heritage
Cultural heritage is ever-present in our lives, but it is often only an invisible framework. Despite its significance and recognized value, it is frequently ignored, sometimes assaulted , and rarely-valued. Certain organizations are trying to bring it to the fore. Museums, monuments and heritage sites are among such establishments. These are paradoxical institutions. On the one hand, they benefit from reliable high trust capital ; on the other hand, they are / seem to be uninteresting for the general public. They are accused of being dusty, old-fashioned, boring, stiff etc. but they display a fairly large dynamism in their offer compared to other cultural and educational suppliers. This intervention aims to bring into question how museums/ heritage sites carry out their educational and cultural mission. Heritage should not be a passive educational resource. It could be a partner for personal development, both for the children and the grown-ups.
The New Heritage Studies and Education, Training, and Capacity‐Building
The modern conservation movement that began to influence heritage practice globally from the mid nineteenth century propagated a " one size fits all " approach. It dealt primarily with monuments and sites, which were seen as belonging only to the past, threatened by the actions of nature and human beings, and best understood and interpreted by heritage professionals – the experts – through the application of scientific approaches (Wijesuriya 2010). In this view, the role of the present generation is to act as guardians and to ensure that, in the words of the Venice Charter, monuments and sites are passed on to future generations " in the full richness of their authenticity " (ICASHB 1964: pmbl.). Such authenticity was to be judged in terms of materials, form, design, and setting, thus placing the main focus on fabric and leading to an educational response that focused on the technical. This way of understanding heritage and going about its conservation has been identified as the Conventional Conservation Approach (Wijesuriya 2010). Since the 1980s, scholars have criticized it as too narrow and fabric‐bound, and have sought to focus more on the cultural politics underlying the interpretation and valuation of heritage. Among those developing these criticisms, Laurajane Smith (2006) characterized the conventional approach as Authorised Heritage Discourse. The present volume makes it abundantly clear that it is now necessary to deal with a wide variety of issues, many of which have been discussed in the preceding chapters, and that the range of disciplines relevant to the task has broadened beyond archeology and architecture to CHapter 37
Help needed! Reflections on a Critical Pedagogy of Heritage
History and Approaches to Heritage Studies, 2019
The final chapter to an edited volume on the history of heritage pedagogy and how archaeologists have approached heritage explores my views on the rift between heritage and archaeology. For most nonarchaeologists, archaeology has little to do with their daily lives; some even reject archaeological knowledge. Heritage, on the other hand, is central to identity, to self-esteem, and to daily life. Most archaeologists unfortunately and indiscriminately conflate archaeology with the pasts they study and those pasts, with heritage. Archaeologists need to recognize this divide between relatively low public interest in archaeology and the publics’ nearly universal interest in heritage, figure out why the divide exists, and develop some ways to reduce the distance. This chapter offers a trial hierarchy of heritage awareness and intensity of interest and suggestions for meshing archaeology pedagogy with it.
Breaking barriers - The Future is Heritage - 2018
Breaking barriers - The Future is Heritage, 2018
“You are the future!” is a commonly heard exclamation by cultural heritage policy makers aimed at young people engaged in the heritage field. Organizations like UNESCO and Europa Nostra try hard to involve young professionals in their policy. Likewise, cultural corporations like museums, heritage institutions and cultural policy makers are quite keen to involve youngsters as their audience and as participators. Or so it seems. Young people are seen as the cultural heritage policymakers, museum visitors, employees and investors of the future. But what is the common view of the value of youth participation for young people now? From the 19th of June until the 22th of June, The Future is Heritage Summit took place during the European Year of Cultural Heritage (2018). Young heritage professionals from all over Europe responded to the call for papers on how they viewed cultural heritage and it future in their country and Europe. The entire program of the summit was set up, developed and finalized by these young participants and in Berlin they literally took the stage. With a broad intercultural and European context, the young heritage professionals addressed topics in the cultural heritage sector and with this, they exchanged their thoughts and learned about each other’s history and backgrounds. The Future is Heritage Summit gave young heritage professionals a change to share their thoughts and work. Without premeditation, the summit gave a stage to talk and listen professionally, to create a dialogue. The summit was there to get influenced and changed by what others had to tell. To charge the participant with new energy and to create a network. There were vivid discussions, interesting workshops and inspiring visits to museums and heritage sites in the city of Berlin. It was a tremendous success. In this article, we explore the challenges we and other young heritage professionals experience in starting our careers in the European heritage field. We’ll talk about how and why we organized The Future is Heritage, and how it was shaped through participating with young professionals. Also, we explore community participation in general. For those who didn’t attend The Future is Heritage, we made an overview of our program. We conclude this article by talking about the aftermath of The Future is Heritage and our lessons learned by participating in this extraordinary event.
A Companion to Heritage Studies, 2015
Heritage and heritage studies have evolved in quite astounding ways over the last sixty years. Nobody could have imagined when the Venice Charter (ICASHB 1964) jumpstarted the heritage profession in the aftermath of World War II that there would be a veritable heritage boom in the 1990s, and continuing into the twenty-first century. Who would have predicted that so much attention would now be paid to protecting environmental features, material culture, and living traditions from the past, or the vast numbers of community members, policy-makers, practitioners, and scholars engaged in caring for, managing, and studying heritage? Who would have foreseen the explosion of heritage-based cultural tourism, the reconfiguration of heritage as an economic asset, and a World Heritage List comprising of more than a thousand properties spread around the globe? This volume seeks to investigate the story of expansion in heritage and heritage studies. Containing 37 chapters commissioned from 44 scholars and practitioners from 5 continents, it is designed to provide an up-to-date, international analysis of the field, the steady broadening of the concept of heritage and its social, economic, and political uses, the difficulties that often arise from such uses, and current trends in heritage scholarship. Starting from a position of seeing "heritage" as a mental construct that attributes "significance" to certain places, artifacts, and forms of behavior from the past through processes that are essentially political, we see heritage conservation not merely as a technical or managerial matter but as cultural practice, a form of cultural politics.