What constitutes appropriate and inappropriate forms of heritage commodification? Discuss, using examples. (original) (raw)
The commodification of cultural heritage has been vilified by the heritage community. This attitude has resulted in a lacuna of knowledge about how it operates in the heritage context. Yet, heritage is increasingly subject to commodification and the topic can no longer be ignored. Creating a synthesis of the arguments and case-studies presented at the 9th Cambridge Heritage Seminar entitled Packaging the Past: The Commodificiton of Heritage, this article seeks to re-evaluate the process of commodification and explore its consequences (negative and positive) on cultural heritage. Through a critical engagement with the historical development of the concept of commodification, this article explores what changes have occurred since Hewison's seminal 1987 volume The Heritage Industry. We emphasize investigating the issues of emotion, agency, entertainment, authenticity, legality, value, and memory in this context.
Heritage, Consumption and Content. Case Histories?
Cultural Heritage. Scenarios 2015-2017 -- Venice Ca' Foscari - ISBN 978-88-6969-179-9, 2017
Heritage is more easily communicated, reached and talked about in the digital age, a time in which the spreading of transport opportunities – and a long period of peace in Europe – have eased and developed cultural tourism and cultural heritage tourism. But has this situation led to a more open dialogue between visitors and local stakeholders, to ensure the destinations' heritage conservation and, generally speaking, their sustainability? Or has it simply boosted consumption?
Cultural Heritages: Process, Power, Commodification
Cultural Heritages as Reflexive Traditions, 2007
This book explores the concept of heritage from the perspective of anthropologists working in different regions in Africa, Asia, Australia and Europe. 1 Although all the contributors are located in the discipline of anthropology, this does not necessarily imply that all have the same conceptual understanding of the issues involved. Several essays explore the notion of heritage (e.g. Aspraki, Costa, Kockel and Magowan) and it is very clear, that there are shades of difference in meaning. This underlines the need for a book such as this to explore anthropological definitions of and contributions to heritage on an international scale. In any case, one could hardly assume that a single English-language word could encapsulate all concepts and understandings of the term 'heritage', and there are probably different nuances in terminology in diverse languages. The Polish word for heritage is dziedzictwo, which derives from the verb dziedziczyc (to inherit) and the noun dziedzic (heir), and refers to 'what has been inherited'. Individual buildings, monuments, and so on are not 'heritages'. Instead they are items of heritage, and constitute specific elements of a broad collective inheritance. 2 The Swedish word arv also implies something that is passed on; an inheritance from which one cannot distance oneself or escape from. This is a passive rather than an active form of inheritance. It is received rather than earned. 3 The Spanish word patrimonio corresponds to the English word 'heritage', but it is also used in ways that would not apply in the British context and can refer to individual wealth or to the total capital of a company. Patrimonio nacional, for example, is an economic term for the wealth of a country, the sum of its assets, but it can also refer in a cultural sense to the heritage of a nation. It is for this reason, perhaps, U. Kockel et al. (eds.), Cultural Heritages as Reflexive Traditions
Heritage Commodified – tangible and intangible values vs global commercialisation EN.pdf
Heritage Commodified – tangible and intangible values vs global commercialisation Abstract John Ruskin was perhaps the first to discover the value of travelling (and thus resultant personal recognition) as an activity which helps to sustain historical sites. Over the past two hundred years, travelling patterns have changed along with tourists, whose inducements to visit have also changed. The concept of heritage which has emerged following the damage resulting from WWII is much more complex than that which applies to a single monument or historic site. It seems that one of the turning points was the concept of identifying outstanding universal value in 1975, which allows monuments to be enrolled in the World Heritage List by UNESCO. Commercialisation of heritage, along with the tourism which followed and the accompanying evolution of protection measures, has brought about the critical danger of aggressive uncontrolled development by the tourism industry in response. We face gradual loss of the authenticity of heritage, which seems to be being overwhelmed by commerce. Around historic sites, these processes have caused precarious social problems due to transmutation of historical habitats into tourist traps. It seems that we have reached the period of final opportunity to combat the negative impact of heritage commodification if we are going to be able to address these problems meaningfully. This paper discusses the issues with the help of case studies of famous " destinations " , e.g. Venice, Cracow, Stonehenge and others.
Mace and Zhu (2021). Notions of Heritage. Presses de l’Université du Québec , 2021
What is heritage ? This is the most fundamental but difficult question to be answered in heritage studies. It has been addressed many times, but singular definitions always seem to come up short. This book contributes to understandings of heritage as a multifarious construct. It sees it not as something defined by material objects, but as a cultural, economic, and political resource, a discursive practice, and as a process or performative act that engages with the past, present, and future. Notions of Heritage explores the challenges and consequences that result from overlapping, outdated understandings of heritage, as well as new notions of heritage altogether, whether in form or in practice, paving the way forward in the field of critical heritage studies.
Food Heritage and Nationalism in Europe, 2019
Observe, describe, don't freeze At the beginning of the long 19th century, heritage belonged essentially to the cultural sphere. It was no diff erent for food heritage. Intellectuals, historians and folklorists made large use of it with the aim of "awakening" the national consciousness-as the phrase went. They used it as part of the nation-state discourse (Berger and Conrad 2014). Such rhetoric powerfully conveyed a strong feeling of inclusion within the nation, well described as wir Gef ü hl (the "us" feeling) by Norbert Elias. But it also implied othering and the exclusion of "aliens". Food and taste, more than other elements of the imagined community of the nation (Anderson 1983), convey the feeling of "home", embody sensorial memories imbued with nostalgia and nurture the feeling of belonging together. Thanks to its nature, rooted in culture as much as in the zoe-mere everyday life-food has proved extremely successful in linking the idea of the Kulturnation to its daily domestic experience, thus indirectly supporting the interpretation of the nation as a family, sometimes even in the ethnic sense. As Paolo Capuzzo suggests here (Chapter 4), since the beginning of industrialization-which obviously took place at diff erent times in diff erent countries-and even more so in the age of globalization, food heritage has rapidly shifted towards commodity: it has turned into commodity heritage-artefacts modifi ed in order to enter the global market (Grasseni 2005). More: they have become "a political artefact, on its way to becoming a tourist artefact" (Mintz 2003 , 26). Both UNESCO's nominations to world intangible heritage and the EU's quality place-based labelling, created in their diff erent ways as means of protecting culinary diversity and authenticity, have generated risks, as Laura Di Fiore (Chapter 2) and Fabio Parasecoli (Chapter 3) point out in this book. Thus, cuisine heritage has turned into a truly contested issue which has even fuelled food wars, especially where ethnic, national or political confl icts have existed, as discussed in the introduction. Gisela Welz refl ects on the case of two products. Lokoumi Geroskipou, linked with the fi rm Aphrodite's Delight based in the Greek part of
Heritage out of Control Introduction
Heritage out of Control: Introduction, 2022
Focusing on the absences, affective dissonances and the silent consensuses, the Heritage out of Control: Waste, Spirits and Energies Workshop held in May 2021 aimed at rethinking the place-oriented, static and secularized notions that abound in debates on heritage. This thematic thread emerged out of four overlapping questions that brought the three of us together: Under what circumstances does waste become heritage, and heritage becomes waste? How does the intimate relationship between spirits and energies operate in relation to the abstract public that heritage presupposes? Can spirits, rituals, energies be imagined as heritage? What unfolds from seeking answers to these questions in relation to the focus of heritage studies on materiality and spatiality? Engaging these questions, we aimed to explore the beyonds and the in-betweens of the tangible-intangible divide according to which heritage has predominantly been categorized and kept under control by heritage actors as well as scholars. The workshop proved to be a venue to disassemble the illusion of control by exploring the destabilizing power of what we call the ‘undesirables’ of the carefully curated heritage space, namely waste, spirits, and energies. With a focus on the ‘undesirables’, we aim to see what happens when the narrative of control is destabilized. Turning our attention to the potency of non-humans and matter, we intend to offer a perspective on heritage beyond anthropocentric as well as Eurocentric mechanisms that create the illusion of control. While our main focus on these ‘undesirables’ allows us to destabilize the official genealogies and lineages that bolster our notion of inheritance, we also attend to negative and difficult heritage to deepen our understanding of the multiplicity of temporalities that inhabit material space.
HERITAGE IN MULTICULTURAL TIMES
I universal discourses. Two issues come to the fore in this purpose: first, the J historicization of heritage; and, second, the disentanglement of the perverse J union of heritage with the law. Historicization is well known to anthropology, where it has taken the form of introspection. Rabinow (1986) called it to -T 'anthropologize the West'; Chakrabarty , 'provincializing Europe'. The J purpose is the same: to situate a practice, a relationship, a meaning geohistor-I ically and geopolitically; to show how they come to be, their happening. That f ÿÿ j we can do with heritage: to bring it back to its place of origin; to pluralize it; to | take it away from the experts and from the possessive embrace of the state; to | unveil the fetishist operation, its naturalizing intention.2 Historicizing heritage J means bringing home what appears to be removed, afar; pointing to its famil-I iarity; locating and questioning the apparatus that fetishized it and reified it. | To be sure, heritage does not fetishize or reify itself. Someone does it: museum J officials; archaeologists; historians; legislators and their decrees; tourism and 1 the market; transnational promoters of humanism. f And then there is the issue of the entanglement of heritage with the law, J its utter complicity. Indeed, a fetishized and reified heritage (our heritage, the j éá