Understanding heritage and memory
Edited by Tim Benton"Memory is perhaps the most powerful force in the creation of heritage, but it is also the most fractured and diverse in its interpretations and responses - essential reading"
Susan Pearce, Emeritus Professor of Museum Studies, University of Leicester
"At last, an accessible, definitive and imaginative vision of heritage for the 21st Century"
Andrew Hoskins, Editor-in-Chief Memory Studies
"Really puts the discourses of the "old" heritage world to the test. Bravo!"
Ian Lilley, Professor of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, University of Queensland, Australia
"An indispensable work for all scholars and students interested in questions of public history, memory and heritage."
Nick Shepherd, Associate Professor, Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa
We often think of heritage as collective remembering, but war memorials and non-material aspects of culture, such as language and literature, can also function as tools for collective forgetting. The past we inherit and the present we create are both plagued with problems of commemoration, for just as memory adapts to new circumstances, so too does heritage.
This book challenges the assumption that the criteria for conservation can be reduced to a single set of set of aesthetic, historical or scientific judgements. It explores the tensions between natural and cultural classifications of World Heritage sites, and questions whether the concept of ‘cultural landscape’ advances our historical understanding or merely confuses the layered meanings of a cumulative past. While First World War memorial sites in Britain provide a vehicle for national memories, examples of Italian, German, Singaporean and Malaysian landscapes also show parallel, and sometimes dissonant, memory work in action.
The book is unique in drawing together heritage and memory studies by considering the role of multiculturalism and virtual worlds in transforming the relationship of heritage to issues of memory, identity and a changing environment. Can heritage practices reconcile the aspirations and histories of everyone in diverse societies? How do notions of heritage create communities in the vivid but ephemeral experiences of ‘Second Life’? Does a digital archive represent ‘memory’?
With its firmly interdisciplinary and global approach, Understanding Heritage and Memory will be of interest not only to students of heritage studies, but also to students and professionals in the fields of archaeology, architecture and built environment studies, art history, anthropology, sociology, history, human geography, religious studies, museum studies, cultural studies, natural heritage management, and leisure and tourism studies.
This book is one of three in the Understanding Global Heritage series.
Contents:-
List of figures
Notes on contributors
Preface
List of abbreviations
Introduction
1. Heritage and public memory - Tim Benton and Clementine Cecil
2. The heritage of public commemoration - Tim Benton and Penelope Curtis
3. Contentious heritage - Karl Hack
4. Heritage and changes of regime - Tim Benton
5. Multicultural and minority heritage - Rodney Harrison
6. Heritage, landscape and memory - Susie West and Sabelo Ndlovu
7. Intangible heritage - Rodney Harrison and Deborah Rose
8.: Heritage and the recent and contemporary past - Rebecca Ferguson, Rodney Harrison and Daniel Weinbren
Glossary
Acknowledgements
Index
Tim Benton is Professor of Art History at The Open University
Understanding Global Heritage
246x189mm 328pp
pb 9780719081538 01 January 2010 £24.99
80 b&w illustrations
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