ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the political and social uses of heritage and their role in the construction, elaboration and reproduction of identities. It concerns the interplay between knowledge's of heritage in the context of politics and power, but also with their physical manifestation in built environments. Contemporary cultural geographers, however, regard landscapes less as places shaped by lived experience than as largely symbolic entities. Landscape interconnects with a series of interacting and constantly mutating aspects of identity, which include: nationalism, gender, sexuality, race, class, and colonialism/postcolonialism. The chapter discusses two analogies to heritage, landscape and musicology. Single landscape views simultaneously in a variety of ways, emphasizing how hegemonic interpretations are always open to subversion. Alongside this complex role in the validation of power structures, heritage is also deeply implicated in the construction and legitimation of collective constructs of identity, such as class, gender, ethnicity and nationalism.
