How do borders shape heritage and its potential for change? Despite the growth of international connections in heritage studies, national, linguistic and disciplinary borders continue to structure scholarly and practical approaches to heritage. The aim of this session is therefore threefold. First we will address which borders limit our understanding of heritage today. What are the roles of linguistic, disciplinary, religious and national borders? Which methodologies are best suited to overco...

Le 19e siècle aura été celui de l’invention européenne des monuments, historiques et de nature. Le 20e, plus spécifiquement sans sa seconde moitié, aura été celui du patrimoine, en particulier dans sa version mondiale, telle que soutenue par les États-Unis des années 1970. Or, en ce début de 21e siècle, de nouvelles formes de mobilisations mémorielles émergent: de la rue Champlain de Québec au quartier Xintiandi de Shanghai, de Bercy-Village à Paris à South Bank de Londres, ou bien encore aux...

Much is being made of the perceived breakdown of the nation-state, which was historically configured as a “container” of heritage formations, adopting and perusing local traditions where possible but oppressing them where deemed unsuitable. Migration is seen as eroding the rigid boundaries of this configuration, potentially liberating identities and heritages in the process. This session addresses the relationship between critical heritage and redefinitions of self, other, community and place...

The notion of heritage is closely linked to processes of change. In the Western context, the definition of heritage as "a contemporary product shaped from history" (Harvey 2010) highlights the extent to which our relationship with the past is being continually re-configured. However, there is a future dimension implied in this relationship that is often neglected; to paraphrase William Morris, the sense in which heritage testifies to the hopes and aspirations of those now passed away. Making ...

Le patrimoine n’est pas un donné, c’est un construit culturel et social, dynamique et itératif (Gravari-Barbas). La construction patrimoniale est la construction d’une croyance à partager/imposer. Le statut d’objet patrimonial que l’«on» (experts, élites, décideurs…) donne à un objet suppose de le saisir comme spécifique. C’est aussi l’occasion d’une saisie de la dynamique qui amène la spécificité patrimoniale, cette même dynamique qui est le terrain d’action des politiques, des prises en cha...

Many people are actively using working class heritage as a resource to reflect on the past and the present, and there is a growing tendency for the heritage of working class people to be interpreted and presented to the public in museums and heritage sites—see for example the Worklab network of museums. Working class communities and organizations also play active roles in creating a memory of their own past, and mobilizing this to sustain political action in the present. Drawing on scho...

In many parts of Europe and North America, but also in Australia, Japan and parts of China, regions of heavy industry, in particular regions of coal and steel industries, have been in decline since the 1960s. In many of these regions, the transition to post-industrial landscapes has provoked discussions surrounding industrial heritage, what to do with it and for which purposes. One of the most ambitious industrial heritage projects was initiated in the Ruhr region of Germany from the 1960s on...

We would like to propose a session, building on the one we ran at the 2014 CHS conference in Canberra, on how emotion and affect feature in the fields of heritage and museums studies, memory studies, public history, heritage tourism, studies of the built and urban environment, conservation, archives and any field of study that deals with the emotional impact and use of the past in the present. There is an increasing interest in how emotion is a form of judgement on things that affect ou...

With his expression "ceci tuera cela," Hugo established almost two centuries ago a strong link between words and stones as transmission vehicles of human memory. We heritage experts would be inclined to consider stones as more reliable than words, what semiology seems to confirm: stones are clues, and clues are, according to Roland Barthes, tangible proofs of “what has been.” But the inspector Columbo has often shown how we can play with these clues, and Umberto Eco would easily forgive us th...

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 ...

The constructed and political nature of heritage claims is now acknowledged across the disciplines, and increasingly even among heritage professionals. But already Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, in their seminal The invention of tradition, had proclaimed that “all invented traditions, so far as possible, use history as a legitimator of action and cement of group cohesion” (1983:12). So rather than simply diagnosing heritage as being constructed, as such (ab-)use of history, their challenge...

In exploring the broader question “What does heritage change?” this session presents work that is extending heritage policies and practices beyond elite cultural narratives. Using diverse disciplinary perspectives and drawing from case studies around the world, the presenters explore contexts in which stakeholders’ perspectives and choices have been catalysts for change, democratized knowledge, or exposed gaps in contemporary heritage practices. The case studies reveal complex and often conte...

Dans la tradition occidentale, le patrimoine culturel trouverait ses fondements «dans le concept chrétien de l’héritage sacré de la foi» (Babelon et Chastel 1994), dont la conservation des objets religieux sous l’Antiquité et le culte des reliques seraient les prémices. Posant alors le principe du «transfert de sacralité», on emprunta le vocabulaire et les techniques du premier pour construire le second, qualifiant ainsi le fait patrimonial comme le culte laïc des productions humaines. Le sac...

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...

Photography was recognized as an instrument of heritage preservation from the moment of its inception in the early nineteenth century, when projects such as Les Excursions Daguerriennes (1841-1843), a set of Romantic engravings of monuments based on photographic documents, established the links between sight and science, memory and history, hortatory reification and ‘ruin lust’ (Brian Dillon, 2014). This session was conceived in the certain knowledge that almost every speaker at t...

L’art contemporain, lorsqu’il est en relation avec le patrimoine culturel, que ce dernier soit bâti ou qu’il mobilise d’autres matériaux ou supports, tend à reconfigurer les rapports de la société à ses patrimoines et à son histoire. Il est ainsi à même d’ajouter, de modifier, de détourner ou même de transformer les valeurs historiennes ou esthétiques communément associées au patrimoine culturel d’une nation, d’une région ou d’un groupe social ou ethnique; y compris d’ailleurs en ce qui conce...

This session proposes a critical and epistemological reflection on sustainable urban heritage conservation. Recent research on the management of urban heritage following its conservation process is characterized by a growing number of studies that aim to provide an overview of how to assess the sustainability of existing practices. This dominant focus of the research has contributed to the development of indicators and approaches to sustainable development in this field. In addition, it has a...

While historical churches are being abandoned all over the Christian West, more and more places are growing the opposite way: pilgrimage sites are being enlarged and enhanced, whole urban districts are being developed with churches and temples boasting diverse, and often unorthodox, religious practices. Epistemologically linked to heritage, the sacred now seems to follow a path of its own, staging itself in new settings where the “religious heritage” refers mostly to common practices, however...

The roundtable will explore ideas around the concept of insignificance. That is, how things are judged to be unimportant, not worthy of conservation, meaningless, or without substantive power or influence. We will examine this notion in relation to the history, theory, and practical application of significance as a concept and method in heritage. In short, we will discuss the significance of insignificance. The notion of ‘significance’ is central to heritage conservation in many pa...