Preservation of cultural heritage is often carried out by voluntary workers in local communities, especially when the objects are not of major national interest, not listed, and not preserved by heritage authorities. The motivation for local preservation, and for spending time and money on objects belonging to the community, is not primarily to preserve cultural heritage objects for the future, but to establish and maintain common social institutions in the local society, institutions of vital importance to the local identity. The aim of this paper is to investigate how the local understanding of heritage relates to its official understanding in a Norwegian context. The paper will also examine to what degree the Norwegian heritage authorities have managed to implement the emphasis on local participation and the social dimensions of heritage, given strong articulation in later international conventions. Criteria for value assessment, as defined by national heritage authorities, do not seem to play a vital ...

Identifying heritage values in local communities

In recent years an interest in ‘critical heritage studies’ (CHS) has grown significantly – its differentiation from ‘heritage studies’ rests on its emphasis of cultural heritage as a political, cul...

Critical heritage studies and the legacies of the late-twentieth century heritage canon

The present article investigates the linkages between conserving cultural heritage, maintaining cultural diversity and enforcing human rights. While there seems to be a growing awareness of these linkages in international heritage and human rights circles, they remain poorly understood by many heritage practitioners who see their conservation work merely as a technical matter. The article argues that it is essential for practitioners engaged in heritage conservation projects to understand the broader economic, political and social context of their work. However, heritage scholars and teachers, too, need to recognise that there can be many motives behind official heritage interventions, that such action is sometimes taken primarily to achieve political goals, and that it can undermine rather than strengthen community identity, cultural diversity and human rights. Such a reorientation is an extension of the paradigm shift in which heritage is understood as cultural practice. In this more critical heritage studies discipline human rights are brought to the foreground as the most significant part of the international heritage of humanity.

Cultural diversity, cultural heritage and human rights: towards heritage management as human rights-based cultural practice

Tourism landscapes are constructed and marketed in selective ways that reaffirm long‐standing patterns of social power and inequality and thus influence whose histories and identities are remembered and forgotten. The purpose of this article is to conduct an analysis of plantation tourism marketing in North Carolina, measuring the degree to which the history of slavery and the enslaved are (in)visible within online promotional texts. Previous research has found that the slave experience is frequently ignored in promoting the Southern plantation, although the analysis of North Carolina has been limited in the past and no studies to date have examined the promotional images found on plantation websites. An analysis of 20 websites for historic plantations in North Carolina does not reveal a universal exclusion of the enslaved but it certainly shows an uneven treatment both in terms of the absolute number of textual references to slavery and the frequency of these references relative to other themes used in m...

(In)Visibility of the Enslaved Within Online Plantation Tourism Marketing: a Textual Analysis of North Carolina Websites

This paper analyses urban entrepreneurialism in relation to the commodification of urban heritage in the context of China. The case study is Lijiang Old Town in Yunnan province. It is found that there are three markets through which profit is extracted from urban heritage: the tourist market, the real estate market and the capital market. These markets, ranging from simple to complex, reflect the Lijiang local government’s innovative efforts to deepen the commodification of urban heritage and enhance local competitiveness. By discussing how profit is distributed, I argue that Lijiang’s local government and its ruling elites have benefited more from tourist revenues than any other groups. An analysis of Lijiang’s demographical displacement demonstrates that urban heritage is implicated in the complicated choices made by ordinary individuals in the face of political control and capital accumulation.

Stuart Hannabuss

Papers

The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity