Heritage between economy and politics: An assessment from the perspective of cultural anthropology

Abstract

In the 1990s, a critical cultural historian could exclaim, with considerable frustration, ‘Suddenly, cultural heritage is everywhere’ (Lowenthal 1996: ix). Since then, scholarship on heritage practices has enjoyed a boom of its own. It is as difficult to categorise the scholarship about it as to comprehend the phenomenon: constitution, use, evaluation, and critique of cultural heritage intertwine in scholarly discourse as much as they do in heritage itself. Thus the 2003 volume Rethinking Heritage, edited by Robert Shaman Peckham, assembles contributions from geography, history and art history, landscape planning and philology. This hybrid composition signals that heritage concerns everyone, from the tourism expert to the philosopher of late modernity. Each grouping of practitioners and experts harbours its own conception of heritage; their expectations seldom harmonise with one another. In his introduction, Peckham tries to simplify the range of meanings as follows: For most people today ‘heritage’ carries two related sets of meanings. On the one hand, it is associated with tourism and with sites of historical interest that have been preserved for the nation. Heritage designates those institutions involved in the celebration, management and maintenance of material objects, landscapes, monuments and buildings that reflect the nation’s past. On the other hand, it is used to describe a set of shared values and collective memories; it betokens inherited customs and a sense of accumulated communal experiences that are construed as a ‘birthright’ and are expressed in distinct languages and through other cultural performances.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 138 citations exist upstream.