ABSTRACT
My conception of global heritage assemblages fundamentally depends on understanding cultural heritage as human practice. According to the anthropologist Lisa Breglia, such an understanding of “heritageas-practice” is a relatively new approach that opposes the conventional understanding of “heritage-as-artifact”.1 Breglia claims that the “ everyday-life”2 of heritage is not to be found in examining material culture but, rather, in analyzing the actors and interactions involved in the production and reproduction of heritage. Correspondingly, Breglia introduces her concept of “the heritage assemblage”, which she refers to as “a multi-sited object of study, through which we may interrogate how ruins and other landscape features become heritage”, as well as “for whom and why this is important”.3 In Monumental Ambivalence: The Politics of Heritage, Breglia describes how a specific heritage assemblage in Mexico unfolds as ambivalently “composed of national law and policy, institutional practices, sui generis international heritage regimes, global economies and multiple publics”.4 She concludes that a heritage assemblage is “a set of values, meanings, and practices differently constituted at local, regional, national, and international levels”.5
