Introduction: Heritage Gone Global. Investigating the Production and Problematics of Globalized Pasts

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Acknowledgements

This special issue is based on a research seminar organized by the Danish Research Schools of History and of Anthropology. The editors would like to thank the two research schools for their support and not least the three keynotes participating in the seminar; Sharon Macdonald, Eric Hirsch and Richard Handler. Moreover, we thank the contributors for their articles and for their comments to this introduction, as well as the anonymous peer reviewers for their comments and suggestions to the articles in this issue.

Notes

[1] David Lowenthal (1994: 43) reminds us that even earlier, the term heritage referred exclusively to aristocratic lineages and inherited positions of the privileged.

[2] The literature on cosmopolitanism has boomed over the last decade and includes important edited volumes by Cheah and Robbins (1998) and Vertovec and Cohen (2002) as well as a special issue of Public Culture edited by Pollock et al. (2000). Even more recently, anthologies edited by Werbner (2008a), Nowicka and Rovisco (2009) and Meskell (2009a) seek to engage specifically in the practicalities of cosmopolitanism, often by use of anthropological methods and field studies. Other significant voices include Appiah (2006), Benhabib (2006) and Beck (2000, 2002, 2004).

[3] For related criticism of Beck’s universalism, see Werbner (2008b).

[4] The declaration is reprinted and discussed in ICOM News, no. 1, 2004.

[5] The UNESCO report Our Creative Diversity (1995) provides an eloquent example of such a “banal globalism”.