This session explores the different ways late modern states control and translate heritage, both their own and that of others. While modern governments have always played a role in the production and authorization of heritage, late modern states have unprecedented command over the heritage landscape. Coinciding with the postwar economic boom, globalization, and most recently neoliberalism, the state has come to dominate the most vital aspects of heritage, ranging from research (heritage produ...

Heritagization (the various means by which cultural features—either material or immaterial—are turned into a people’s heritage) has recently become, for Amerindian groups, a major means to gain visibility and recognition in the new Latin American social and political landscapes where cultural diversity is endowed with an increasingly critical role. Different forms of cultural heritagization have largely been studied elsewhere, particularly in North America. However, they are far less known in...

Since the beginning of the 19th century religious buildings and artefacts of the West have been involved in a continuous process of musealization. In the time-period subsequent to the Second World War, the general forces of secularisation increasingly turned religious buildings, most of them churches, into heritage and substantial parts of Christian practices into history. On a global scale (Western), conservation and heritage practices have been applied on tangible and intangible expressions...

La question du futur  de la patrimonialisation et de son influence sur les sociétés et les acteurs sociaux est au cœur des interrogations actuelles sur les patrimoines liés aux hôpitaux et à la santé. Certes l’avenir des patrimoines des hôpitaux et de la médecine paraît aujourd’hui fort incertain. Cependant, en France comme au Québec, la sauvegarde des patrimoines liés à la santé a suscité un réel intérêt dans les trente dernières années. Les recherches que nous conduisons depuis 1989 m...

Inscrite à l’origine dans le cadre d’un projet ANR, « ANTIMOINE » , cette proposition de session suggère une vision novatrice des outils nécessaires à la constitution de savoirs relatifs aux activités humaines situées (anthropologie des territoires), savoirs élaborés à partir d'objets du patrimoine et de leur interprétation (lecture). Eu égard à la réalité caractérisant les systèmes d'informations patrimoniaux qui fonctionnent essentiellement à partir de mots-clés avec une prise en compte ...

Questions about the repatriation of cultural property, issues of access and exclusion in the World Heritage system, intangible heritage practices in conflict with human rights norms, or the ways in which the international human rights regime is interpreted as a form of cultural heritage itself: rights are now considered relevant in a broad variety of heritage situations. This is reflected in the incorporation of references to human rights in a series of key international heritage-relate...

This session will address the potential and limitations of heritage as a tool for leverage, empowerment and dissent in Africa. It is widely acknowledged that heritage—the selective valuation and use of the past in the present—can be an oppressive. Heritage work in Africa has even been characterized as "an instrument for dictatorship" (Peterson et al. 2015:28) because it is often implicated in upholding particular narratives and political orders, imposing a singular vision onto a heterog...

The field of heritage has emerged as a key site of reflection. Influenced by shifts in the academy (e.g., post-colonial, post-structural and feminist theories), heritage scholars are bringing increased attention to the deployment of heritage as both a conceptual category and a contested field of power and discourse. Nevertheless, significant challenges remain in communicating what comprises the theoretical and methodological toolkit of heritage studies. Scholars are still mapping out the nuan...

Dans un texte majeur, «L’arrêt de monde», Deborah Danowski et Eduardo Viveiros de Castro explorent le thème de la fin du monde tel qu’il se déploie aujourd’hui «dans l’imaginaire de la culture mondialisée». Entre fiction, philosophie et anthropologie, ils déroulent la scène sombre de nos futurs d’espèce humaine devenue force géologique et autodestructrice vivant non plus sur mais dans une planète considérée comme un être vivant et une puissance menaçante (Gaïa). Si le spectre de la catastroph...

The second half of the 20th century saw the affirmation of national and international heritage administrations run by teams of experts that mutually validated each other’s knowledge and findings. The emergence of new forms of heritage, new collections and international networks related to museums, or other heritage structures, has led to the development of numerous new or reformulated specialities. In the last two decades a new ideal of heritage has gained ground, one based on communities ...