ABSTRACT

Chapter 2 provides a mapping of the overlapping fields with which this book is concerned, in order to set out some working positions on heritage and its uses that enable constructive connections with the fields and theories that relate to it, while also articulating relations to practice and to instrumental agendas. Can memory have a collective dimension, and how is this manifest in constructions of European memory? What then are its articulations with history, heritage and identity? This chapter presents some of the prickly definitional questions encountered throughout the volume (‘heritage’, ‘memory’ ‘history’, ‘Europe’ etc.) and axiological issues concerning the social and civil purpose of the research. It offers an integrated account of heritage and memory cultures in Europe that engages not just with scholarship, but also takes policy, regulation and practice seriously, as means through which heritage, memory and identity are theorised.