ABSTRACT
This chapter explores approaches from different literatures to understanding the past in the present with regard to minor, everyday, personal, and community heritages. These can be suppressed, through imposing authorized heritage discourse, or differenced, through the use of categories such as social history, memory, heritage from below, or intangible cultural heritage. Such distinctions risk devalorizing and further marginalizing non-dominant heritages. A plural heritages perspective enables us to flatten hierarchies without ignoring the multiple interrelations and co-dependencies of different heritages, how they connect, obstruct, and flow through or around one another. Furthermore, this involves a recognition of dissonance between heritages, but also comprehends the possibility that heritages within single places can have qualitative, sensory, ontological plurality as well. The discussion bears upon the question of what – and where – heritage is, and proposes a form of assemblage theory comprehending discursive, human, material, and affective formations of the past in the present.
