ABSTRACT
In a world populated by global signifiers, paradigms and buzz words, ‘heritage’ (with locally equivalent terms in non-English-speaking countries) stands out as conspicuous in its normative resonance, particularly when linked to the expressions ‘cultural heritage’, ‘natural heritage’ or ‘world heritage’. These terms stand for an array of normative as well as commercialised values attaching to the preservation, restoration and display of history, culture and nature. For various purposes, heritage in its multifarious guises is endorsed simultaneously by a global bureaucratic apparatus (the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, UNESCO), a global tourist industry, and national governments. In the 1960s and 1970s ‘heritage’ was the catchcry for strident campaigns to save the endangered material and natural world from depredation, culminating at the global level in UNESCO’s adoption of the World Heritage Convention in 1972. As David Lowenthal (1998) has evocatively shown, the contemporary cult of heritage was a result of the successes of these movements, and the term is fully institutionalised and commercialised as a condensed label for the valorised past – or, as one critic has defined it: ‘a mode of cultural production that gives the endangered or outmoded a second life as an exhibition of itself’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2006: 168). Such is the iconic status of the heritage trope that although ‘heritage’ and its associated assumptions have been subject to continued interrogation and refinement, most professionals and academics who critique its application and definitions ultimately rely on the term, whether because there is no adequate alternative, or because they have a key stake in the term’s preservation as a carrier for their own alternative models (see, e.g., Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996; Smith 2006).
