Heritage, Authority and Power: Understanding Theory Through Practice
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English Heritage is a charity that manages over 400 historic sites in the UK, from prehistoric sites to medieval castles, most of them free, non-ticketed, and unstaffed. As such, there is little information about visitor attendance and behaviour in those sites—a challenge common to other non-ticketed heritage sites. In this context, image-based social media such as Instagram appear as a possible solution, as photographs are often central to the tourist experience, and tourists present their imagined audiences with a self-narrative of their trip. Therefore, this study aims to improve our understanding of tourist behaviour in unstaffed heritage sites by analysing publicly available Instagram data. We collect posts on unstaffed English Heritage sites, finding that posting activity concentrates at a few sites. Focusing on 3,979 images each for the top five sites, we analyse image content using pre-trained object detection models. Besides off-the-shelf inference, we fine-tune a model to identify structures from particular heritage sites, and are able to describe the types of photographs taken by visitors in each site, supporting the notion of tourists as performers with the site serving as backdrop. Overall, this study demonstrates a methodology for understanding cultural behaviour at heritage sites using images from social media posts. In addition to recovering the otherwise lost connection between a heritage organisation and its visitors, our methodology can be readily extended to other tourist destinations to understand how visitors interact with and relate to these sites and the objects within them through their photographs.
The aim of this paper is to promote a greater use of informal conversations in qualitative research. Although not a new innovation, we posit that they are a neglected innovation and a method that should become more widely employed. We argue that these conversations create a greater ease of communication and often produce more naturalistic data. While many researchers have written about the use of informal conversations in ethnography, as part of participant observation, we are advocating that these conversations have an application beyond ethnography and can be used in more general qualitative exploration that occurs in everyday settings where talking is involved. They can be used as the main method but also to complement and add to more formal types of data created through interview. Sometimes informal conversations are not only the best way, they are the only way to generate data. We use examples to show how we have used informal conversations in our research, which we interrogate and use to raise a number of, mainly ethical and methodological, issues. We discuss the main advantages and disadvantages of using this method, including the status and validity of data produced.
This article offers a Latourian perspective on ICOM’s new definition of a museum. It argues that a thorough understanding of politics as a public practice is needed in order to make the definition practically applicable. The task of the museum will accordingly vary depending on how the meaning of a museum as a “democratising, inclusive and polyphonic” space is explicated. Here a hitherto unchartered aspect of Latour’s political philosophy within museum studies is used to investigate the political nature of museums. It is argued that the new definition calls for museums that are diplomatic institutions open to the public, representing the social and its tangible and intangible heritage with a hope for peace, for the mediation of social tensions.
The impact of the COVID‐19 Crisis on museums and galleries has been paramount, with the sector taking on long‐term recovery plans. This paper examines this crisis in the context of temporary exhibition programmes of UK museums, studying online content for 21 museums with exhibitions due to open between March and June 2020. Analysis was conducted, noting how COVID was considered, how content was presented, and discussing the emerging themes of access, embodiment, and human connection. In considering these results in the context of wider digital heritage literature, several questions are raised in terms of how digital content is conceptualised, presented, and valued. At a crucial turning point in the sector, these aspects will need to be considered as museums and galleries continue to adapt in light of a post‐COVID world where practices, both digital and physical, will undoubtedly shift.
Acknowledging and representing identities in ways that connect with contemporary society is one of the most complicated, contested and perhaps critical challenges facing museums. To explore how museums are addressing that challenge, we turned to a source of research that is rigorous, cross‐ disciplinary and often grounded in contemporary ideas of museums as sites of social activism‐doctoral dissertations and master’s theses. We analyzed almost a hundred studies and conducted interviews with 12 of the authors to explore how their research informed their practice. The studies demonstrate a range of ways that museums can and are engaging with complex ideas about identity, largely through exhibitions; occasionally through collections, collaborations, and programs; and only rarely through institutional operations. The studies position identity as core to museum work and perhaps an overlooked variable in the efforts to promote diversity, inclusion, and equity. Drawing from different disciplines, they describe identity as complex, fluid, dynamic, and intimately related to both personal experiences and societal structures of power. The studies provide compelling arguments for why museums need to change the ways they address, acknowledge, and represent identities. These arguments fell into three categories: Opportunity, Responsibility, and Survival. Interviews identified barriers to entering or advancing within the field for individuals who encompass different life experiences and perspectives. Although a small sample, we believe their experiences demonstrate a broken career pipeline that may contribute to the lack of diversity in the field. We conclude that graduate student research may provide a unique catalyst for social change.
The study investigated visitors’ notions of authentic objects across nine different German museums, three science and technology, three natural history, and three cultural history. The findings build on prior studies into visitors’ conceptions of authenticity of artifacts in science museums, indicating a nuanced role of authentic objects for museum exhibitions from the visitors' perspective. The results were generally consistent across all three museum types. Visitors emphasized cognitive effects of authentic objects, wanted authentic objects to be accompanied by additional information, and considered replicas to be legitimate substitutes. Visitors indicated that they accept that authentic objects could include modifications or improvements if the original object contained elements that were fragile or subject to harm from their use in an exhibition setting.
The purpose of this paper is to better understand edutainment and perceived authenticity in the context of the cultural organizations, museums. It aims to discover and understand opinions of museum professionals towards edutainment (as one of the most significant trends) and three components of perceived authenticity of museum visitor experience. Results of the exploratory qualitative study show positive opinions towards edutainment. Three approaches to edutainment are identified: customized, selective and universal. Furthermore, if used correctly, edutainment can help to increase the perceived authenticity of museum visitor experience. However, museum professionals are divided in opinions about the importance of edutainment for the three components of perceived authenticity of museum visitor experience. Research findings provide valuable insights for museum marketing academics and professionals responsible for management of the customer perception of authenticity.
The proliferation of titles for types of museum has resulted in an adjectival explosion in recent years (with museums being engaging, relevant, professional, adaptive, community, national, universal, local, independent, people’s, children’s, scientific, natural history, labour, virtual, symbolic, connected, trust and charitable, amongst many other labels). This paper argues that the adoption of an organizational focus on bureaucratic features such as hierarchical authority, centralisation of power, functional specialisation and research processes can show commonalities in the understandings and challenges linked to museum function. The emphasis on museums as a specific institutional and organizational form allows for the identification and explanation of similarities and differences in their operational existence that extends beyond their particular individual natures. This also implies that the bureaucratic nature of museums has implications for researchers as they are organizations that reflect gender and power dynamics on a micro-level within the research process.
Change is highly valued within the museum sector and related literatures. Despite this emphasis, it is claimed that the field struggles to adequately understand and explain change processes, and that new critical and methodological tools are needed to move discussion forward (Peacock 2013). This paper offers one possible route by developing an anthropologically informed, ethnographic approach to studying the museum as organization. Illustrated through selected empirical materials from the case of the refurbishment of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, the paper focuses on a period immediately following this major capital project. It argues that change is implemented and sustained by the many different players and practices constituting the inner life-worlds of museums as organizations. By analysing the mediatory capacities of, what in some frameworks might be considered, ‘mundane’ everyday activities (such as maintenance work and tour-guiding) the paper seeks to expand understandings of what shapes the dynamics of change in museums.
The editorial provides a framework for considering the museum as organization and its implications for methods.This special issue contains seven empirically driven contributions to provoke further examination of the museum as organization.
This paper considers the divergent and often contradictory registers of ‘community engagement’ in contemporary UK museum practice. The paper draws on an organizational study of a large local authority museum service and focuses on how community engagement is constructed across a range of museum professionals who use it for different purposes and outcomes. I argue that different departments make sense of community engagement through four patterns of accountability, each with complimentary and divergent logics reflecting a wider range of museum functions, demands and pressures. The tensions that arise are discussed. In the final part, the notion of ‘relational accountability’ (Moncrieffe 2011) is introduced to re-settle these divergent logics in order to argue for community engagement work that is grounded in a relational practice. The paper contributes to further theoretical and practical engagement with the work of participation in museums by bringing forward an organizational view to highlight the ways in which museum practice is mediated within organizational frames.
This article addresses the question of how to go beyond the conceptualisation of museums as islands in museum ethnography without losing the ethnographic depth and insights that such research can provide. Discussing existing ethnographic research in museums, the ethnographic turn in organization studies, and methodological innovation that seeks to go beyond bounded locations in anthropology, we offer a new museum methodology that retains ethnography’s capacity to grasp the often overlooked workings of organizational life – such as the informal relations, uncodified activities, chance events and feelings – while also avoiding ‘methodological containerism’, that is, the taking of the museum as an organization for granted. We then present a project design for a multi-sited, multi-linked, multi-researcher ethnography to respond to this; together with its specific realisation as the Making Differences project currently underway on Berlin’s Museum Island. Drawing on three sub-projects of this large ethnography – concerned with exhibition-making in the Museum of Islamic Art, in the Ethnological Museum in preparation for the Humboldt Forum (a high profile and contested cultural development due to open in 2019) and a new exhibition about Berlin, also for the Humboldt Forum – we highlight the importance of what happens beyond the ‘container,’ the discretion of what we even take to be the ‘container’, and how ‘organization-ness’ of various kinds is ‘done’ or ‘achieved’. We do this in part through an analysis of organigrams at play in our research fields, showing what these variously reveal, hide and suggest. Understanding museums, and organizations more generally, in this way, we argue, brings insight both to some of the specific developments that we are analysing as well as to museum and organization studies more widely.
This article assesses the role of the pre-modern past in the construction of political identities relating to the UK’s membership in the European Union, by examining how materials and ideas from Iron Age to Early Medieval Britain and Europe were leveraged by those who discussed the topic of Brexit in over 1.4 million messages published in dedicated Facebook pages. Through a combination of data-intensive and qualitative investigations of textual data, we identify the ‘heritages’ invoked in support of pro- or anti-Brexit sentiments. We show how these heritages are centred around myths of origins, resistance and collapse that incorporate tensions and binary divisions. We highlight the strong influence of past expert practices in shaping such deeply entrenched dualistic thinking and reflect over the longue durée agency of heritage expertise. This is the first systematic study of public perceptions and experience of the past in contemporary society undertaken through digital heritage research fuelled by big data. As such, the article contributes novel methodological approaches and substantially advances theory in cultural heritage studies. It is also the first published work to analyse the role of heritage in the construction of political identities in relation to Brexit via extensive social research.
This paper explores the contradictions of the advent, dissemination and use of the terms “intangible value” and “tangible value.” We examine their logical and grammatical incoherence, and the “work” that these strange terms, so often used in tandem, do to domesticate what are for some people the uncomfortable implications of the concept of intangible cultural heritage. In developing our argument, the paper draws on a range of policy and academic documents to illustrate the extent of the professional and academic unease with the concept of intangible heritage, and the degree to which this unease unintentionally fosters the maintenance of the authorized heritage discourse.
Moving beyond the objectives of conservation, today’s heritage profession aims for heritage management. The management approach reminds professionals and host communities to consider sustainability of heritage in economic, environmental and socio-cultural frameworks. Integration of tourism within heritage management frameworks can provide economic incentives for managing heritage sites and activities, whereas well managed and interpreted heritage resources can be popular destinations for tourism. However, there might be other unwanted and unforeseen consequences of these practices. While providing an economic support for heritage management, the economic attraction may entice exploitation of heritage resources, including over-use, theft and vandalism. Over-marketing of heritage resources may trigger promotion of cheap mimicries of heritage manifestations and values. Such consequences and discussion often revolve around the notion of authenticity—one of the much-talked about and widely used terminologies in both heritage management and tourism. The notion of authenticity may have different meanings for different contexts, resulting in a mismatch of perceptions of what and how to be conserved, preserved, managed and presented. This article explores some of the complications associated with the notion of authenticity in heritage management and tourism, and suggests a contextual approach to authenticity.
Museum curators are rarely the subject of analysis as scientists. By contrast, there is a whole literature on their propensity to give priority to the scientific knowledge of collections over the effort to communicate with different audiences and make museums accessible. This article examines the Late Raphael exhibition at the Louvre (Paris) and draws on the exhibition texts (catalogues, artwork labels, wall texts) to explore the practical activity and preoccupations of the museum curators concerned: the exhibition is simultaneously material for the scientific demonstration of a thesis – part of a debate on the value of the artist’s late works – and for communication aimed at both fellow specialists and the wider public. Communication is not distinct from scientific research and handled with less respect. The two are directly interwoven and communication represents a practical activity with its own difficulties.
Coaching is inherently a reflective process. Constructivist theories of learning are well established and greatly inform thinking on coaching. The coaching practitioner literature promotes activities and offers many tools to aid reflection. While psychology provides some very pertinent theory, a review of practitioner literature finds little to help coaches understand how reflection actually works. This paper proposes a simple four-cornered model of the mechanism of reflection in coaching. The outcomes are illustrated in application to first hand accounts of reflection in a coaching context. This model is intended to have distinct practical utility, while being embedded in underlying theory.
With its rapid spread, intensity, duration, global geographic reach and cross-sectorial disruption, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is so profound that it will become the focus of public exhibitions in the future. Now is the time is to collect examples of material culture associated with COVID-19. Some of the material is generic to healthcare, but some is specific to responses to COVID-19 in the medical and community sphere (e.g. social distancing). A substantive number of objects only exist in the digital sphere. Expanding on concepts initially developed for the collection of items associated with natural disasters and terrorist events, this paper (i) outlines the need for the establishment of local and national collections before items become too scarce and (ii) provides a sample multi-phase collections and collections management framework.
This paper explores the first research phase of the AIATSIS Return of Cultural Heritage Project (2018–2020); where AIATSIS scoped, researched and repatriated significant cultural heritage material from overseas collecting institutions to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Australia. In the initial research phase, the authors undertook a survey of international collecting institutions to scope their holdings of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander material culture and their willingness to repatriate significant objects to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. The results of this survey demonstrate a readiness of institutions to share collection records with AIATSIS and a desire by those institutions to have relationships with the First Nations represented in their collections. The authors also found a willingness by a considerable portion of international collecting institutions to consider the repatriation of cultural heritage material to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. The final part of the paper evaluates the effectiveness of these collection records and associated public repatriation and deaccession polices to submit a repatriation request for the return of significant Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander cultural heritage material to communities in Australia.
The article proposes a postcolonial reflection on the impacts of the ICOM museum definition on the practice of community‐based museums and considers the possible effects of engaging these museums in the international conversations for a new definition. It investigates ICOM’s internal debates on a new museum definition, resumed since 2016, and its normative, political, and financial effects on the reality of community museums in the peripheries of the global South. By exploring the historical roots of the present debate and its decolonial rhetoric, this paper questions what forms of “decolonisation” are at stake, once again, in the discussions concerning a new museum definition for the 21st century. To demonstrate the impacts of the definition on community museums around the world, the article recurs to the example of Brazilian Social museology, which serves to illuminate how the persistence of political relationships between a centre and its peripheries help to define museum marginality. The ICOM museum definition, conceived as a tool by some central agents to be applied globally in different social contexts, establishes the boundaries between the subjects who have the right to memory and the means to make museums and those who are currently deprived of them.
Fine arts museums are undergoing a radical transformation, from closed containers of “things” to porous spaces onsite and online where the visitor experience is paramount. The current moment is accelerating this transformative evolution of museums into institutions that feel relevant and attractive to diverse audiences, now increasingly on multiple platforms. This change on the visitor‐facing side needs to mirror a change in practices and attitudes on the inside. As part of this transformative effort a few art museums are supporting a new generation of leaders that have traditionally been in the shadows—those in charge of conservation and scientific research. The infusion of conservation and science narratives in art museums can change visitors’ mode of engagement, diversify content entry points to art for those drawn to science, inspire new public offerings, transform museum spaces to make the practice of conservation and scientific research visible, and attract new funding streams. In this paper we share recent experiences at the Art Institute of Chicago, distilling some key elements that can help transform museums into more equitable and multidisciplinary spaces of inquiry. The work underway builds on the values of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering Art and Math) education and takes place in the context of a growing field of collaborative and interdisciplinary museum practice.
In 2016, Lisa Gilbert explored issues central to museums: inclusion, diversity, and relevance, which museums seek as they embrace their identities as truly democratic institutions. Yet, museums struggle with these issues because of “loving, knowing ignorance,” a feminist stance that Gilbert expands to include museums that assume authority over a subject yet fail to recognize the subject’s self‐knowledge and agency. Using Gilbert’s example, we explore Curator articles which address this ignorance through example and methodology, with a focus on museums who have successfully addressed their own ignorance as it relates to diversity within exhibition practice.
Since 2006, the AHR has published eleven “Conversations” on a wide range of topics. By now, we have a standard format: the Editor convenes a group of scholars with an interest in the topic who, via e-mail over the course of several months, conduct a conversation that is then lightly edited and footnoted, finally appearing in the December issue. The aim is to provide readers with a wide-ranging and accessible consideration of a topic at a high level of expertise, in which participants are recruited across several fields. As participants respond to one another, a unique informal dialogue emerges, one that exemplifies the interplay of ideas that drives so much scholarship behind the scenes. The procedure also throws open a window onto the process by which scholars turn evidence into conceptualization; these are not polished essays, but thought-in-action. It is the sort of publishing project that this journal is uniquely positioned to take.
The Mutare Museum in Eastern Zimbabwe reorganized an ethnographic collection in one of its galleries in 2016. This article will look at the processes by which traditional drums as part of this collection were reconfigured and ascribed new meanings derived from their everyday ritual uses amongst the eastern Shona community. As one of the curators involved in the researching that led to the co‐production of the exhibition I will demonstrate how we utilized new museology and co‐curatorship in integrating multiple perspectives from the community on socio‐cultural uses of traditional drums. The paper will also show connections between the community and the drums which were previously viewed as static and mute objects. Collaborating with the community in reorganizing drums in the Beit galley will be presented in the paper as a strategy embraced in decolonizing the museum practice.
The term “authenticity” is invoked frequently in heritage and related fields including tourism studies and philosophy. Setting the debate within a wider context of academia and heritage practice, this article explores the concept and takes the specific situation of historic houses to question what the meaning of the term may be and to test whether it has value. It considers who defines authenticity and discusses how it may be recognized in different contexts. It summarizes forms which have previously been defined, but it also brings together the often entirely separate debate of academics and the experience of practitioners. Recognizing that the term is employed across material culture, buildings, and places, it also explores the authenticity of experience, considering if, or how, engagement with heritage as curators, researchers, or visitors is authentic. Ultimately, it questions whether such a nebulous concept can ever be fixed or permanent and proposes instead that it should be recognized as a changing idea, dependent on situation and context, valuable perhaps primarily to those who also seek to define it.
The Empathetic Museum is a group of colleagues who advocate institutional empathy as a transforming force for museums. Our initiative emerged in the second decade of the 21st century amidst a confluence of seismic events in the US that forced the museum field to examine its relationship to social issues. The Empathetic Museum arose as a critique of museums’ indifference and reluctance to engage with issues deeply affecting their communities, especially those of color. We propose a lack of institutional empathy as a subtle yet powerful cause of this indifference. The article traces the development of the Empathetic Museum initiative; the evolution of its philosophy of institutional empathy; the creation of the Maturity Model as a key tool for empathetic practice; and its use and impact in the field. As a work in progress, the Empathetic Museum initiative has evolved and expanded through constant observation of, reflection on, and engagement with the important issues of our time.
This section presents the third volume of Max Weber's fundamental work Economy and Society which has been translated into Russian for the first time. The third volume includes two works devoted to the sociology of law. The first, 'The Economy and Laws', discusses differences between sociological and juridical approaches to studies of social processes. It describes peculiarities of normative power arenas (orders) at different levels and demonstrates how they influence the economy. The second, 'Economy and Law' ('Sociology of Law'), reviews the evolution of law orders (primarily, the three "greatest systems of law" including Roman Law, Anglo-American Law, and European Continental Law) in the context of changes in the organization of economy and structures of dominancy. Law is considered an influential factor of the rationalization of social life which in turn is affected by a rationalized economy and social management. The Journal of Economic Sociology here publishes an excerpt from the chapter 'Law, Convention and Custom' in this third volume, which shows the role of the habitual in the formation of law; explains the importance of intuition and empathy for the emergence of new orders; and discusses the changeable borders between law, convention and custom. The translation is edited by Leonid Ionin and the chapter is published with the permission of HSE Publishing House. © 2018 National Research University Higher School of Economics. All rights reserved.
Post-processual archaeology claimed to represent a new ethical agenda for the socio-politics of archaeological practice and culture heritage management; one that would include multiple “voices” and those from indigenous populations. This article explores the polarizing dichotomy between so-called “exclusivist” and “inclusivist” research trends in socio-political archaeologies that has resulted from this paradigmatic shift. Its critical focus is archaeologies of empowerment/inclusion, i.e. those approaches within the post-processual paradigm that claim empowerment and/or multi-vocality to be their primary mission. It reveals this claim to be philosophically incoherent and to have often failed to work in practice. It concludes that moves toward inclusion and multi-vocality have, in many cases, become complicit with political quiescence and a de-politicization of archaeology. Mapping general tendencies and marrying academic theory and popular culture, this paper exposes a caricatured image of the uses of the past in the present, uses that result in tensions and paradoxes that impact negatively on present-day socio-political archaeologies.
This paper argues that community consultation is not always a democratic process as power often resides with museum staff members who decide which community views to accept and which to ignore. Drawing upon a series of semistructured interviews with community members, community officers, curators and other museum staff as part of the 1807 Commemorated project, I attest that consultative group members often experienced frustration, anger, and disappointment during and after the development of the 1807 exhibitions. These emotions were primarily driven by the communities’ unmet needs and expectations as well as by a clash between object-centric curatorial choices and people-oriented community voices; members of the African-Caribbean community viewed their participation in the consultation meetings both as a means of empowerment of their communities and as a gesture of acknowledgement, social justice and recognition. Thus, it is imperative that community consultation is replaced by active negotiation and engagement that is aimed at shared power and ownership.
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), the famous American writer and humourist, visited Australia in 1895 as part of a moneymaking lecture tour around the equator. He was broke. Of the many things about the continent with which he was taken, one was its ‘picturesque history — Australia’s speciality’, as he called it.2 By this he meant in the then relatively recently established colonies the propensity of individuals and institutions to make convenient pasts that were usable in the present. History was everywhere to be found in public. Civic promoters gave a ‘capital of humble sheds’ the trappings of ‘the aristocratic quarters of the metropolis of the world’. Didactic monuments and memorials were scattered across the landscape. Tall tales but true were built around self-made men .3
In this article, the author proposes a re-examination of the first example of agency given by Alfred Gell in his famous Art and Agency (1998), namely the Zinganga ’nkisi (nail fetish) of Western Africa. This article essentially argues two points. First, the relation between the artefact and the person it incarnates is not, as Gell has defined it, bi-univocal (one-to-one), but can be better described as one-to-many. In the author’s view, the ritual artefact does not work as a mirror reflection, but as a crystal. Secondly, the kind of ‘distributed I’ that the artefact enacts is not composed of a single identity distributed in several material occurrences, as Gell has described it in Art and Agency. In the author’s view, another concept of plurality, defined as a set of different identities condensed in a single object, describes more appropriately the kind of agency that characterizes the ’nkisi.
The aim of this article is to develop a different approach to the study of the material world, one that takes seriously the seemingly banal fact that things are constantly falling out of place. Taking this fact seriously, the article argues, requires us to think about the material world not in terms of ‘objects’, but ecologically, that is, in terms of the processes and conditions under which certain ‘things’ come to be differentiated and identified as particular kinds of ‘objects’ endowed with particular forms of meaning, value and power. The article demonstrates the purchase of this ecological approach through the example of the Mona Lisa. It does so by exploring the rather extraordinary processes of containment and maintenance that are required to keep the Mona Lisa legible as an art object over time.
The 1994 Nara Document played an important role in building bridges between definitions of tangible and intangible heritage and supporting a shift towards a broader values-based approach to the stewardship of the historic environment. Nara+20 marks a second stage in this process, and places the discussion in the context of the present day in the prevalent discourse of globalization and more nuanced concerns for sustainability and resilience. In identifying five priority action areas it calls for the development of new processes and methodologies that recognize heritage values as evolving more than ever before. Decision-making in the conservation field is a complex process dependent on effective negotiation at a time when threats to cultural heritage are also on the increase. Through an emphasis on stakeholder involvement with communities of interest, Nara+20 implicitly signals the diminishing role being played by the State in the heritage field and by extension that of the expert and the scientific discourse from which modern conservation evolved.
Historic sites, memorials, national parks, museums... We live in an age in which heritage is ever-present. But what does it mean to live amongst the spectral traces of the past, the heterogeneous piling up of historic materials in the present? How did heritage grow from the concern of a handful of enthusiasts and specialists in one part of the world to something which is considered to be universally cherished? And what concepts and approaches are necessary to understanding this global obsession? Over the decades, since the adoption of the World Heritage Convention, various 'crises' of definition have significantly influenced the ways in which heritage is classified, perceived and managed in contemporary global societies. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the many tangible and intangible 'things' now defined as heritage, this book attempts simultaneously to account for this global phenomenon and the industry which has grown up around it, as well as to develop a 'toolkit of concepts' with which it might be studied. In doing so, it provides a critical account of the emergence of heritage studies as an interdisciplinary field of academic study. This is presented as part of a broader examination of the function of heritage in late modern societies, with a particular focus on the changes which have resulted from the globalisation of heritage during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Developing new theoretical approaches and innovative models for more dialogically democratic heritage decision making processes, Heritage: Critical Approaches unravels the relationship between heritage and the experience of late modernity, whilst reorienting heritage so that it mighht be more productively connected with other pressing social, economic, political and environmental issues of our time.
In over thirty years of its existence, World Heritage has proven to be very popular. It attracted the attention of not only the heritage professionals, but also of tourists, the tourism industry and scholars. It seems that as World Heritage was becoming popular among tourists, it was also gaining momentum in scholarly research. Based on an interdisciplinay study undertaken on a global level, this paper explores the issues and debates surrounding World Heritage and its future as seen by heritage professionals rather than the local population, governmental bodies, tourists or the tourism industry. In seeking to include the voices that are often left unheard in scholarly research, this study had a sample of 180 heritage professionals based in 45 countries, all of which were States Parties, signatories to the World Heritage Convention. Each of the 45 countries was represented by a chairman or a highly ranked representative from the IUCN and the ICOMOS, a World Heritage Site manager and a Cultural Attaché. An analysis of their responses to an on-line questionnaire and of the informationfiom semi-structured interviews is presented in this paper. It reveals that among all the existing issues and debates such as the question of the (un)equal representation by geographical region and category and the question of indefinite expansion of the World Heritage List, heritage professionals were also concerned with the phenomenon of the evident growth in popularity of World Heritage among tourists and the issues related to balancing conservation and tourism at existing World Heritage Sites.