Special Collection: (Re)Defining Heritage

Editors:
Dacia Viejo Rose, University of Cambridge
Alisa Santikarn, University of Vienna
Oliver Antczak, University of Cambridge
Mariana P.L. Pereira, University of York

The field of Heritage Studies—only a recent development in its own right—has undergone multiple iterations since its early conceptions as an offshoot of other, older disciplines including History and Archaeology, alongside Anthropology, History of Art, and Architecture. With the emergence of ‘Critical Heritage Studies’ the purview of heritage scholars has shifted away from Cultural Resource Management, a largely practice-oriented area of work engaged in caring for archaeological finds and presenting them to the public. Today heritage research is concerned with the social and political resonances of the process of meaning making whereby heritage is not an artefact, material or otherwise, but the emotional, political, and intellectual engagement of people with their temporal, physical and symbolic contexts to makes sense of and give meaning to them. People decide what to categorize as heritage which in turn influences what is to be valued and protected. These decisions are informed by how the word ‘heritage’ is understood. The results of these decisions have material consequences on the world—from what it looks like to who has access to resources—and further shape the future. Perhaps because this radical shift has occurred in a relatively short period, heritage today is understood in a myriad of, at times conflicting, ways by practitioners and academics alike. This is not helped by the fact that key concepts in Heritage Studies such as identity and memory are frequently deployed without a clear articulation of how they are understood in relation to heritage. This special collection seeks to present developments in Critical Heritage Studies since the turn of the millennium, asking how we approach heritage today, and what the future of heritage might look like going forward.