ABSTRACT
What is ‘heritage’? It is not the past, but that which survives from the past, and is ‘inherited’ in the present. It is not history, but the traces of a vanished existence, the footprint that marks the passing of an earlier age. But heritage is a very selective processing of history, a structured abstraction from the past. As individuals we can inherit desirable goods such as money and houses; we can also inherit syphilis and sickle-cell anaemia. When undesirable realities, such as poor housing and disease, survive from the past into the social present, no one refers to these as part of ‘our’ heritage. So a more precise definition of heritage, still within the metaphor of personal inheritance, would be those things which we ought to be pleased to have left to us. At this point historical intention or accident becomes moral obligation: since we ought, having inherited these things, also to be prepared to look after and ‘conserve’ them.
