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Heritage and practices of public formation

Reduced to its simplest of terms, heritage refers to the contemporary activities through which the past comes to matter in the present. In this respect, when most of us write or speak about heritage, we are referring to a social framework of institutions and practices that select, conserve and present material and intangible traces of the past. Within such activities, judgments are made as to which particular aspects of the past are worthy of preservation and are of potential significance for social memory. All this is no doubt well understood. Institutions of heritage and the practices they organise are attempts to embody, through landscape, artefact, text and performance, something of the story and spirit of a social entity, whether defined as an all-embracing notion of humankind or delimited as a particular nation, region, religion, or ethno-cultural group. Furthermore, it has become commonplace to acknowledge that how and what gets named as essential to the story and spirit of any social entity must always be understood as regulated (and potentially contested) within the power relations that constitute what counts as heritage. Such acknowledgement inevitably brings to the fore the concerns: ‘whose heritage is being referred to?’ and ‘who is defining it for whom?’ These are clearly extremely important questions in that they help us resist an all too facile, reductive nationalism which suppresses acknowledgment of the multicultural complexity of contemporary nation states within our era of hyperglobalisation. They also can help us resist attempts to construct levelling notions of a universal heritage that fail to acknowledge not only the very real differences as to the substance and meanings of past and present lives, but the terms on which such differences have been constituted. On such terms heritage practices are practices of recognition and proprietorship. They are practices ultimately assessed in relation to who it is that may or may not recognise themselves as those addressed by them. That is, who it is that may experience a felt sense of belonging to the story and spirit of the social entity being re-articulated through the activity of heritage (Hall 2005). The question of whose heritage is being represented ends up constituting heritage as a form of property relation, as signalling that a particular set of stories, songs, artefacts or texts belong to somebody. This opens concerns regarding the rights and responsibilities of proprietorship. Thus one’s answer to the question who has the right to do what with ‘my heritage’ will not only be based on one’s own life experience, but also on one’s inscription as a member of a bounded sociality that defines itself in part through the (at times, contested) discourse as to what is to be included in its common past.