Affect, Heritage, Feeling

Abstract

A core concern of this chapter is the ways through which heritage is given meaning. Of course, heritage in terms of institutionalized sites, for example, is rendered with particular meaning or character, significance or importance, embedded in a particular narrative, through inscription, illustration, and increasingly also with staged performance, sound and orderly accompaniment. Yet, arguably, these forms of heritage are merely fragments in a wider and deeper mixture of prompts, memories, other sites, relations and feelings in our own lives, as ‘ordinary’ individuals going about our living. As Crang and Tolia-Kelly (2010) have carefully argued and evidenced, there is a significant influence across cultures of iconographies of heritage: matters of colonialism, post-colonialism, race, gender and, I would add, class. Through this piece, the emphasis is less on the iconographic or culturally overarching and more on the energies, feelings, affects and emotions wrapped up or available in our encounters with heritage.