Immersive digital technologies and 3D models are changing the way in which archaeology and heritage are presented to the public. Here we consider the role of physical 3D replicas and the values they ...hold vis-à-vis digital reproductions. We begin with a consideration of conceptions of 'real' versus 'fake' and the evolving history of academic notions of 'authenticity'. Then we explore a particularly significant recent case study, the creation of the replica known as the Cave of Chauvet 2, France. We discuss the choices underlying its construction, its selected characteristics and the intended experience that is offered to visitors. Our aim is to consider the manner in which visitors perceive the replica. Our research findings are based on interviews conducted with visitors and staff at the Cave of Chauvet 2 and observations of visitor management at the site (2016, 2017). We focus our discussion around the visitor experience of authenticity, the extent to which the replica has proven able to stand in place of the original. Our results proved surprising: over 90% of visitors gained an authentic heritage experience and, for many, the replica created a state of hyperreality in which they subconsciously meshed reality with simulation.
The heritage making of nature is a process of reconquest of spaces and resources identified in the long term by traditional uses, as agriculture, farming or subsistence fishing. Beyond the ...conflictual frontline resulting from such processes, seem to arise various forms of arrangements (spatial and actorial) that allow local people to be part of stakeholders’ games and to benefit from a dynamic, from which they felt to be excluded. The aim of this paper is to analyze in parallel three examples chosen in South Africa, Argentina and Chile, illustrating various forms of arrangements, more or less efficient, and produced or co-produced by local people.
Transnational migration has contributed to the rise of religious diversity and has led to profound changes in the religious make-up of society across the Western world. As a result, societies and ...nation-states have faced the challenge of crafting ways to bring new religious communities into existing institutions and the legal frameworks. Regulating Difference explores how the state regulates religious diversity and examines the processes whereby religious diversity and expression becomes part of administrative landscapes of nation-states and people’s everyday lives. Arguing that concepts of nationhood are key to understanding the governance of religious diversity, Regulating Difference employs a transatlantic comparison of the Spanish region of Catalonia and the Canadian province of Quebec to show how processes of nation-building, religious heritage-making and the mobilization of divergent interpretations of secularism are co-implicated in shaping religious diversity. It argues that religious diversity has become central for governing national and urban spaces.
Les lycées, en particulier ceux du XXe siècle, constituent une catégorie d’édifices encore mal connus, mal identifiés, parfois mal compris, malgré les études récentes consacrées aux multiples aspects ...que recouvre le patrimoine des lycées, à la fois matériel, immatériel et mémoriel. Cependant, depuis une dizaine d’années, le, ou plutôt les patrimoines des lycées, sont devenus de véritables axes de recherche des historiens et des historiens d’art et, par ailleurs, l’un des thèmes privilégiés de...
This article shows how Christmas in schools and public service media for children (PSM) involves negotiation and renewal of Christian cultural heritage. Across the studied cases from Norway and ...Denmark, we find that the institutions involved seek to realize community. However, community is approached differently in different settings. It is either understood restoratively as a process in which children, including immigrant children, become part of an existing societal community, or constructively as establishing an inclusive community across cultural and religious divides. A major finding is that activities associated with Christianity such as school services are framed in a language of ‘museumification’ and not as part of a living religious practice with the capacity to change and transform. Whereas Islam is positioned as a ‘religious other’, Christianity understood as culture facilitates creative heritage making, establishing community across religious divides. Contrary to political rhetoric, Christian cultural heritage in schools and PSM is by and large not dominated by a safeguarding nationalistic discourse. Rather, traditions and activities related to Christianity are negotiated and appropriated for the benefit of an inclusive community. A premise for making this succeed in schools and PSM is to negotiate Christian cultural heritage as culture, not as religion.
Drawing on the articles in this issue and those published in the 2016 special section "Critical ethnographies of urban heritage in the western Mediterranean region", this afterword critically ...reflects on the significance of the Mediterranean region as a particular dimension for heritage research.
What do anthropologists and cultural activists share during ethnographic investigations on heritage-making? What can the association of academics and cultural actors reveal about heritage as a ...process and heritage as a social fact? This paper draws on an ethnographic study on musical heritage-making in southern Portugal, especially focused on non-governmental associations involved in preserving and promoting traditional and popular music. After sketching out the context of the research, I present two modalities of association within anthropology and cultural activism in order to analyse the extent to which a sense of ease, discomfort or negotiation shape investigation practices in critical heritage studies. Using one local heritage association as an example, I show how social hierarchy, knowledge legitimacy and material techniques of heritage-making function as criteria of the mutual assessment put into practice by the activists and academics present in the field. I also argue that taking the easiness and uneasiness of such ethnographic associations into account helps draw out the ties between morality and materiality of heritage-making.
Les lycées, en particulier ceux du xxe siècle, appartiennent une catégorie d’édifices encore mal connus, mal identifiés, parfois mal compris, malgré les études récentes consacrées aux multiples ...aspects que recouvre le patrimoine des lycées, à la fois matériel, immatériel et mémoriel. Cependant, depuis une dizaine d’années, le ou plutôt les patrimoines des lycées, sont devenus de véritables axes de recherche des historiens et des historiens d’art et, par ailleurs, l’un des thèmes privilégiés d...
Cultural Europeanisation in Peru has been an aspiration since its independence in 1821. Until 2010 the only institution of higher musical education in Peru had classical European music on a pedestal, ...rejecting all others, but especially indigenous Andean music. And for the Peruvian state, since its beginnings, the major forms of musical arts were considered to be an expression that originated in the recent history of Europe. This Eurocentric approach was challenged in several instances, such as the revolutionary regime of Velasco Alvarado which rose to power in 1968, that established a series of laws geared towards the building of a new sense of national culture and identity, including music. But also by other initiatives undertaken by the recently created Ministry of Culture in 2010, that makes it possible to hint a path towards the decolonisation of cultural institutions on Peru.
This interview was carried out to mark the approaching twentieth anniversary of what has become a seminal text within French heritage studies: Le Patrimoine saisi par les associations (Heritage in ...the Hands of Associations). Ahead of its time, this work by the French sociologists Hervé Glevarec and Guy Saez shed light on a number of important yet little-studied dynamics relating to the interactions between the field of heritage and associations in France. Today many of the aspects they outlined (the role of the associative sector in expanding the notion of heritage in France; opening up of the category of heritage to include customs, rituals, know-how and memories; the interest in following the biographical trajectories of heritage actors) have become a common part of heritage making and a focus of heritage studies around the world. Somewhat surprisingly, there has been very little intellectual follow-up of Glevarec and Saez’ pioneering work. As well as detailing the social context that led to the study and underlining some of the key findings, in the interview Glévarec and Saez point to some significant evolutions in political, intellectual and moral paradigms affecting contemporary cultural heritage production. Accordingly, the interview demonstrates the historical value of ethnographic and sociological studies which, when compared with more recent research, can help chart the extent of transformations of a social field over time.
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