Urban Heritage and Social Movements

Abstract

Critical heritage studies inevitably confront the conflict between the desire for conservation and corresponding processes of demographic elimination. In this chapter, the authors deploy a position of “engaged anthropology” to contest persisting essentialist approaches to heritage and culture – a legacy of nineteenth-century anthropology – that still largely undergird most nationalist and other identitarian discourses and that occasionally, in their extreme form, morph into an excuse for genocide and mass destruction. They focus on urban heritage. More recent research examines ways in which uses of heritage as place-making shift under neoliberal and transnational governmentality. In recalling the diverse social movements that have coalesced around heritage and urban sustainability, the authors again reject the analytical use of the informal–formal dichotomy because it is itself directly implicated in structural violence.

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