This issue of the journal presents a broad range of theoretical and practical approaches to cultural heritage. First, we are very pleased to present three distinguished lectures from a conference held at the Center for Heritage & Society at UMass Amherst last year: Heritage & Healthy Societies—Exploring the Links Among Cultural Heritage, Environment, and Resilience.Footnote1 The goal of the conference was to explore the application of the past to contemporary and future social challenges, specifically sustainability and well-being. Critical global issues such as climate change, rising sea levels, and displacement of peoples have not often been addressed through the lens of heritage, and the goal of this conference was to address that crucial silence.
Michael Herzfeld makes the critical point: “The contested concept of heritage has increasingly been used by powerful and privileged actors—the state, the wealthy, corporations, and even universities—to justify their expropriation of inner-city areas.” He then goes on to discuss various forms of social protest—graffiti, mass protests, various “occupy” movements—and the cultural and historical processes that lead to the social insecurity that underlie such protests, including gentrification, ethnic cleansing, and “heritagization.” One of Herzfeld's key points is that the unnatural separation of “tangible” and “intangible” heritage in the heritagization process has privileged “preservation over social process and elite choices over the tastes of ordinary people.”
Rodney Harrison, likewise, underscores another artificial distinction in heritage codification—that between natural and cultural heritage. By dissolving such a boundary, he argues that heritage can be seen as “a series of diplomatic properties that emerge in the dialogue of heterogeneous human and non-human actors who are engaged in practices of caring for and attending to the past in the present. As such, heritage functions toward assembling futures, and thus might be more productively connected with other pressing social, economic, political, and ecological issues of our time.” He calls for a definition of heritage as a regime of care in which heritage futures are actively assembled in “anticipation of an outcome that will help constitute a specific (social, economic, or ecological) resource in and for the future.”
In Jane Grenville's distinguished lecture, she reevaluates her seminal 2007 paper, “Conservation as Psychology: Ontological Security and the Built Environment.”Footnote2 She examines ontological security in the context of two case studies from Yorkshire in post-crisis Britain, asking the critical question: Is heritage an elite luxury or the means to maintain a sense of well-being in the face of an uncertain future? Grenville's notion of ontological security as applied to cultural heritage was a strong inspiration for the theme of the Heritage & Healthy Societies conference, especially with respect to the concepts of well-being and place attachment. Her original article, and the current paper, focus on the link between conservation and a community's connections to “the past.” She concludes that “archaeologists and social and architectural historians … have a fundamental political function to work with local populations to uncover what is important to the community… and to signal to governments, both local and national, that healthy and resilient societies are founded on the ontological security that their sense of place provides for them.”
In this issue we also have a research article by Elizabeth Kryder-Reid: “Crafting the Past: Mission Models and the Curation of California Heritage.” In this article she examines a fascinating case study in which the “tangible” heritage objects are not from the past but are representations of understanding of the past. Miniaturized models of California missions have been, and continue to be, created for both public and private display and used in both educational and commemorative contexts. By tracing the production of these models over nearly one hundred years, her paper questions the role of heritage professionals in mediating community-created heritage.
Finally, we are pleased to share with you three book reviews. The first review, by Ethan Carr, reviews Towards World Heritage: International Origins of the Preservation Movement, 1870–1930, edited by Melanie Hall. As Carr states, the book “provides an improved basis for more critically informed understandings of the origins of historic and scenic preservation, generally, and the changing purposes and meanings embedded in these activities.” Mariko Fujioka reviews Negotiating Culture—Heritage, Ownership, and Intellectual Property, edited by Laetitia La Follette. The book covers a wide range of topics, from endangered languages to DNA, and includes such subjects as the relationships between indigenous peoples and archaeologists, cultural property, language revitalization and preservation, and the rights of indigenous peoples more generally. Finally, Morag Kersel reviews Tourism and Archaeological Heritage Management at Petra: Driver to Development or Destruction?, edited by Douglas C. Comer. As Kersel points out, Petra is one of most iconic tangible heritage sites in the world, but there has been a long disconnect between site management plans and tourism. The authors argue that the site warrants a comprehensive management plan that balances the desires of heritage professionals with the desires and needs of the local community. Kersel's review ends on the observation that most of the management plans for Petra have been created by Western heritage professionals and calls for the central involvement of Jordanians. This circles us back to the paper by Herzfeld in which he notes that the heritagization process can privilege preservation over social process, to the detriment of social sustainability and healthy societies.
Notes
1 Organized by Elizabeth Chilton, Sophia Labadi, and Matthew Hill, May 2014: http://www.umass.edu/chs/news/conferencespast.html.
2 International Journal of Heritage Studies 13(6):447–461.