Heritage as a Focus of Research: Past, Present and New Directions

Abstract

Heritage is a version of the past received through objects and display, representations and engagements, spectacular locations and events, memories and commemorations, and the preparation of places for cultural purposes and consumption. Collectively, these ‘things’ and practices have played a central role in structuring and defining the way heritage is understood within academic debate, public policy and, subsequently, how it has been formalized as a focus of research over the last 30 years or so. Across this timeframe, the emphasis has undoubtedly changed from a concern with objects themselves — their classification, conservation and interpretation — to the ways in which they are consumed and expressed as notions of culture, identity and politics. More recently, heritage scholars have also started to concern themselves with processes of engagement and the construction of meaning, so that a post-post-structural, or more-than-representational, labyrinth of individuated, affective, experiential and embodied themes has started to emerge. As a consequence of these theoretical developments, the relatively long period of conceptual stability surrounding even critical notions of heritage is now starting to slip and disintegrate, with debates that we might have thought were finished now being revivified. ‘Authenticity’, ‘memory’, ‘place’, ‘representation’, ‘dissonance’ and ‘identity’, examples of the sorts of concepts that have been challenged or refreshed as new modes of thinking, drawn and applied from the wider social sciences, have started to stimulate new theoretical speculation.