ABSTRACT
It is not clear how old cultural heritage is. Not the items that make up what we call cultural heritage but rather the notion of cultural heritage, the idea that a particular set of things belong to a special category that we call cultural heritage. One of its earliest explicit incarnations dates back to 1685 when Spon established the concept of archaeographia. He defined archaeographia as “knowledge of the monuments through which the Ancients transmitted their religion, history, politics and other arts and sciences, and tried to pass them down to posterity.” However, the notion of CH as we know it was developed after the principles of the Enlightenment. It was inherently material and axiological, as it only encompassed objects of high historical or artistic value – according to the European cultural canon. In the last decades of the 20th century, the Enlightened version of CH came under intense crossfire from inside and outside the field. As the tenets of the original CH discourse were challenged, a new, non-axiological version of CH was developed. This not only meant that popular or non-Western cultural expressions were not to be regarded as inferior anymore but also that immaterial cultural products such as performances, traditions, or languages, etc. (the so-called intangible cultural heritage, or ICH) were reckoned as worthy cultural expressions in and of themselves, deserving similar appreciation to that of tangible CH. This non-axiological, ICH-encompassing CH discourse has now become standard among scholars, cultural officials, and even the general public.
