The critique of the separation of natural and cultural heritage is now well established. Rather than repeat arguments against what many would now acknowledge as an artificial separation, this paper ...considers the implications of working within the expanded field that is created for heritage when the dissolution of the boundaries between natural and cultural heritage is taken as given. I argue that embracing this dissolution allows us to reorient and reconceptualize heritage. Heritage is understood here as a series of diplomatic properties that emerge in the dialogue of heterogeneous human and non-human actors who are engaged in practices of caring for and attending to the past in the present. As such, heritage functions toward assembling futures, and thus might be more productively connected with other pressing social, economic, political, and ecological issues of our time. Indeed, we need not look far to comprehend alternative forms of heritage-making that already model such connectivity ontologies. Fundamental to understanding the value of these alternative heritage ontologies is the recognition of ontological plurality: that different forms of heritage practices enact different realities and hence work to assemble different futures. Following on from this point, I sketch out an ontological politics of and for heritage-a sense of how heritage could be oriented toward composing "common worlds" or "common futures," while maintaining a sensitivity to the ways in which each domain of heritage relates to a particular mode of existence. At stake here is the acknowledgment that each such mode of existence produces its own particular worlds and its own specific futures. I do this within the context of a consideration of the implications of the recognition of a certain set of entanglements of culture with nature, the folding together of what we used to term the human and the non-human, which characterizes our contemporary moment. To illustrate these points, I introduce the framework for a new collaborative research program, Assembling Alternative Futures for Heritage, which considers the implications of working across an expanded field of heritage practices and attempts to reconfigure the relationship between heritage and other modalities of caring for the future.
Historic sites, memorials, national parks, museums…we live in an age in which heritage is ever-present. But what does it mean to live amongst the spectral traces of the past, the heterogeneous piling ...up of historic materials in the present? How did heritage grow from the concern of a handful of enthusiasts and specialists in one part of the world to something which is considered to be universally cherished? And what concepts and approaches are necessary to understanding this global obsession?
Over the decades, since the adoption of the World Heritage Convention, various ‘crises’ of definition have significantly influenced the ways in which heritage is classified, perceived and managed in contemporary global societies. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the many tangible and intangible ‘things’ now defined as heritage, this book attempts simultaneously to account for this global phenomenon and the industry which has grown up around it, as well as to develop a ‘toolkit of concepts’ with which it might be studied. In doing so, it provides a critical account of the emergence of heritage studies as an interdisciplinary field of academic study. This is presented as part of a broader examination of the function of heritage in late modern societies, with a particular focus on the changes which have resulted from the globalisation of heritage during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Developing new theoretical approaches and innovative models for more dialogically democratic heritage decision making processes, Heritage: Critical Approaches unravels the relationship between heritage and the experience of late modernity, whilst reorienting heritage so that it might be more productively connected with other pressing social, economic, political and environmental issues of our time.
Rodney Harrison is a Lecturer in Museum and Heritage Studies at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. He has a broad range of experience teaching, researching and working across the fields of cultural and natural heritage management in the UK, Australia and North America. Prior to his current position, he worked for the Open University, where he was responsible for teaching, research and public broadcasting in global heritage studies.
List of Figures List of Tables Preface and Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: Heritage everywhere 2. Some definitions: Heritage, modernity, materiality 3. Prehistories of World Heritage: The emergence of a concept 4. Late modernity and the heritage ‘boom’ 5. Critical heritage studies and the discursive turn 6. Intangible heritage and cultural landscapes 7. Heritage, diversity and human rights 8. Heritage and the ‘problem’ of memory 9. Dialogical heritage and sustainability 10. A future for the past? Notes References Index
Cultural and natural heritage are central to ‘Europe’ and ‘the European project’. They were bound up in the emergence of nation-states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where they were used ...to justify differences over which border conflicts were fought. Later, the idea of a ‘common European heritage’ provided a rationale for the development of the European Union. Now, the emergence of ‘new’ populist nationalisms shows how the imagined past continues to play a role in cultural and social governance, while a series of interlinked social and ecological crises are changing the ways that heritage operates. New discourses and ontologies are emerging to reconfigure heritage for the circumstances of the present and the uncertainties of the future. Taking the current role of heritage in Europe as its starting point, Critical Heritage Studies and the Futures of Europe presents a number of case studies that explore key themes in this transformation. Contributors draw on a range of disciplinary perspectives to consider, variously, the role of heritage and museums in the migration and climate ‘emergencies’; approaches to urban heritage conservation and practices of curating cities; digital and digitised heritage; the use of heritage as a therapeutic resource; and critical approaches to heritage and its management. Taken together, the chapters explore the multiple ontologies through which cultural and natural heritage have actively intervened in redrawing the futures of Europe and the world. Praise for Critical Heritage Studies and the Futures of Europe 'Filled with many fascinating and diverse chapters, this book vividly demonstrates the dynamism and breadth of critical heritage study of, in, and entangled with Europe today' Sharon Macdonald, Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) in the Institute of European Ethnology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. 'Far from being restrictive, let alone chauvinistic, the multiscalar European focus of this book confirms the breadth and relevance of current critical heritage studies. With contributions addressing such topical issues as climate emergencies, urban landscapes, cultural industries, new media and identity politics – be they written by established scholars or by emerging researchers – it is ""Europe"" with all its shared grounds and recurrent divergences that comes into sharper relief. From this vantage point, readers of this compelling book will be better positioned for reflecting on and eventually influencing and challenging our heritage futures.' Nathan Schlanger, Professor of Archaeology, École nationale des chartes, Paris. 'This book addresses European heritage realities and futures through new voices, paradigms, and methods. It is a collage of tensions – practically a representation of Europe itself – through which to comprehend contemporary intersections of time, place, things, and meaning. It contributes to new vistas in heritage studies: the offer of design and imagination as methods; reckonings with data and climate change as seemingly uncontrollable actors; and the ongoing negotiation of ""criticality"" in the making of our responsibilities for the past in the present' Christopher Whitehead, Professor of Museology, Newcastle University.
This paper considers the implications for cultural heritage of observations regarding individual and collective memory which suggest that the process of forgetting is in fact integral to remembering ...- that one cannot properly form new memories and attach value to them without also selecting some things to forget. Remembering is an active process of cultivating and pruning, and not one of complete archiving and total recall, which would overwhelm and cause us to be unable to make confident decisions about which memories are valuable and which are not. I argue that the same is true of heritage; that as a result of its increasingly broad definition, and the exponential growth of listed objects, places and practices of heritage in the contemporary world, we hazard becoming overwhelmed by memory and in the process rendering heritage ineffective and worthless. I refer to the consequence of this heterogeneous piling up of disparate and conflicting pasts in the present as a 'crisis' of accumulation of the past. To deal with this crisis adequately, we must pay increased attention to the management of heritage. This should not only refer to processes of preservation and conservation, but also to active decisions to delist or cease to conserve particular forms of heritage once their significance to contemporary and future societies can no longer be demonstrated. Deaccessioning and disposal must become a key area of attention for critical heritage studies in the coming decades if heritage is to remain sustainable and uphold its claims to relevance in contemporary global societies.
Heritage Futures Rodney Harrison, Jennie Morgan, Sefryn Penrose, Caitlin DeSilvey, Cornelius Holtorf, Sharon Macdonald, Nadia Bartolini, Esther Breithoff, Harald Fredheim, Antony Lyons, Sarah May
UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures,
07/2020
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Preservation of natural and cultural heritage is often said to be something that is done for the future, or on behalf of future generations, but the precise relationship of such practices to the ...future is rarely reflected upon. Heritage Futures draws on research undertaken over four years by an interdisciplinary, international team of 16 researchers and more than 25 partner organisations to explore the role of heritage and heritage-like practices in building future worlds. Engaging broad themes such as diversity, transformation, profusion and uncertainty, Heritage Futures aims to understand how a range of conservation and preservation practices across a number of countries assemble and resource different kinds of futures, and the possibilities that emerge from such collaborative research for alternative approaches to heritage in the Anthropocene. Case studies include the cryopreservation of endangered DNA in frozen zoos, nuclear waste management, seed biobanking, landscape rewilding, social history collecting, space messaging, endangered language documentation, built and natural heritage management, domestic keeping and discarding practices, and world heritage site management.
Heritage relies, to a large extent, on notions of endangerment and consequential attempts to arrest or reverse processes of loss and change. The papers in this special issue engage critically with ...this underlying orientation, exploring the social and cultural work which is produced through efforts to avert loss. In doing so, the papers also point towards alternative ways of valuing objects, places and practices which are not solely determined by notions of endangerment and risk. We suggest three general themes which connect critical investigation of these issues across the varied natural and cultural heritage contexts through which these papers work - the inevitability of loss; the politics of loss; and the potential in loss. These themes have significant implications not only for the future of natural and cultural heritage preservation, conservation and management but also in mapping out future research directions for critical heritage studies.
Archaeologists have long been interested in contemporary material culture, but only recently has a dedicated subfield of archaeology of the contemporary world begun to emerge. Although it is ...concerned mainly with the archaeology of the early to mid-twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in its explicit acknowledgment of the contemporary archaeological record as multi-temporal, the subfield is not defined by a focus on a specific time period so much as a particular disposition toward time, material things, the archaeological process, and its politics. This article considers how the subfield might be characterized by its approaches to particular sources and its current and emerging thematic foci. A significant point of debate concerns the role of archaeology as a discipline through which to explore ongoing, contemporary sociomaterial practices-is archaeology purely concerned with the abandoned and the ruined, or can it also provide a means by which to engage with and illuminate ongoing, contemporary, and future sociomaterial practices?
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