ABSTRACT
Chapter 19 focuses on the broad shifts in values and substance within the “conservation movement” during the late 20th century. It focuses on discourses and ideas that once underpinned its claimed status as an authoritative “grand narrative”, and showing how, today, those certainties are in radical dissolution. The chapter specifically homes in on three aspects of the heritage discourse in particular. Firstly, the sharp-self-definition of “place”, increasingly challenged by the processes of globalisation; secondly, the internal theoretical structures of conservation, with their reliance on the concept of “authenticity”, now displaced away from fixed authoritative monuments towards the amorphous territory of intangible heritage or memory landscape; and thirdly, the diminution of the old authority ascribed to the “old” as against the “new”. Shaped by the postmodern shift from a preoccupation with “reality” to one centered on “image”, these elements have merged together in a disorienting manner.
