HERITAGE IN MULTICULTURAL TIMES (original) (raw)
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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
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, which underlines the need for a book such as this to explore anthropological definitions of and contributions to heritage at an international scale.
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.
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.
Introduction: Heritage-Outside-In
International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2016
Heritage' is one social imaginary used by people to define identity in relation to ideas about the past. But global flows of people, ideas, imaginations and technologies (Appadurai 1996; Urry 2007) are challenging established group/community/national identities and the dominating systems and discourses of power that constitute heritage. This special issue offers a range of insights about those challenges to the nature and importance of heritage and identities from the perspectives of those 'outside' the authorised realm of heritage discourse (Smith 2006). Important to us are the power relations that constitute the shifting, contested and puzzling assumptions of difference used to define 'inside' and 'outside' positionality (Hall 1999; Littler 2005). We see 'heritage-making' as a process of cultural production in relation to the past by which people make sense of their world and their place within it, as well as strategically assert their voices in the public sphere. Heritage is interpreted not as an intrinsic quality possessed by objects, buildings or places or even intangible practices, but a signification or valuation of the past undertaken by all humans to give meaning to their lives. Heritage as 'making' is a performative act; an active and affective expression of individual and community senses of self (Robertson 2012). Performative heritage seen as an act of voice infers a more political expressing of opinion, being heard, and registering that opinion in a way that is recognised and valued in democratised world-making. Heritage expression as 'world-making' draws on Arendt (1958) who passionately argued for a public realm with the power to gather strangers together, mobilising both semblance and difference in order to confront the complexities and uncertainties of human life in diverse communities (Simon and Ashley 2010). In this process, peoples will seek to retain the ability to make worlds (choose, express and change their rooted identities) in ways that they control socially, economically and politically. By making heritage, 'outside' or minority individuals and groups represent their own cultural difference, but also articulate their relationship to the collective polity in their home/place/nation (Shryock 2004). Much international academic research about heritage and marginalised or minority peoples situates such peoples as 'beneficiaries' of mainstream institutional social inclusion activities (Lynch and Alberti 2010). This special issue takes the 'outsider' perspective, inspecting independent heritage-making actions and projects driven by ethnic, racial and other (sub)cultural groups and individuals. The research topics presented here aim to understand heritage-making activities as phenomena within globalisation and de-colonialisation, bound up in the negotiation of identities and subjectivities by marginalised or migratory peoples, thus shaped by the social, cultural and political ecologies of signification on the ground. The 'outside-in' approach is an essential component of critical heritage studies, which advocates a theoretically and politically informed analysis of the processes in society that produce and consume the past, often from a bottom up perspective (Smith 2012; Winter 2013; Witcomb and Buckley 2013). While heritage scholars have long included critical perspectives (e.g. Hewison 1987; Lowenthal 1996), critical heritage theorists foreground power relations and invite 'the active participation of people and communities who to date have been marginalised in the creation and management of "heritage"' (Smith 2012, 534). This special issue looks at those multifaceted power relations that ground in transcontinental
The Heritage Machine. A Heritage Ethnography in Maragatería (Spain)
PhD Dissertation, Universidad de León. Contents, Conclusions and Bibliography only, 2013
1. We can account for power configurations as by-products of specific heritage assemblages and configurations. Conceived this way, it ceases to be a transcendent entity to become an ambiguous but earthly process whose conditions of emergence can be traced and challenged. 2. Heritage is granted an ontological status and is not only considered as an epistemological construct, thus being co-constitutive of reality and inherently political: it builds subjectivities, breaks apart, or reinforces specific states of things. It is slippery and diffuse, and can hardly be accounted for through ideological critique as it is neither bad or good, progressive or reactionary. This will depend on the affects and connections it promotes, the energies it releases or restrains, and the subjectivities and ways of life it constructs. 3. Heritage is as much a physical construct as it is a social or political one – does not intangible heritage comprise bodies? –. To understand heritage as meaning and mere political representation, or contrarily as a thing ruled by ‘natural’ laws of market value, is problematic. With Latour, we can talk about construction, but not only about ‘social construction’ (Latour 2005c). This mechanism will enable us “to produce problematized matters of concern: things rather than objects” (Zaera-Polo 2008: 76). 4. The dichotomy between explanation and interpretation vanishes. Because heritage presents open-ended interpretations and cannot be framed within a closed set of causal relations and laws, we can only provide partial explanations and understandings (Law 2004a). Therefore, we should avoid the reductionist getaway that bestows agency to entities which irradiate meaning and act as primary causes, such as the State (Breglia 2006; Herzfeld 2010), the State and the elites (García Canclini 1999), the professionals and experts (Smith 2006) or Capital (Harvey 2001)) The existence of certain powerful agencies in heritage – which I do not deny – cannot prevent us from looking at processes of social mimicry and contagion, struggles –material and symbolic – around objects, and to acknowledge the ’diffuse’ character of heritage that renders it so slippery. 5. Assemblages are always involved in different lower and higher level assemblages. Therefore, we should abandon the infeasible hard-line scientific task of ‘individuating heritage data’ or striving to define ‘what is heritage’. We must face instability and assume that heritage is diffuse, which does not undermine its ontological status whatsoever. Furthermore, assemblages are boundless and open-ended. Consequently, without relinquishing thorough methodological depth, we must acknowledge that our analyses are fundamentally incomplete. Referring to the issue of analysis, Geertz argues that “the more deeply it goes the less complete it is There are a number of ways of escaping this—turning culture into folklore and collecting it, turning it into traits and counting it, turning it into institutions and classifying it, turning it into structures and toying with it. But they are escapes” (Geertz 1973a: 29). 6. Heritage and spatial planners cannot take heritage value for granted and must be sensitive to the particularities of each context, thus jettisoning universal concepts and empty signifiers such as community or sustainability (Gunder 2006). There are no heritage resources, but rather processes of valorization to be modulated according to planning criteria
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.