Heritage and the Late Modern State I
My Session Status
• imagined communities,
• heritage in conflict and cooperation,
• critical sustainability perspectives,
• the rise and fall of expert knowledge,
• rethinking heritage policies beyond elite cultural narratives,
• the future of heritage.
Sub Sessions
American archaeologists in service of the nation state have long denied an ancient presence of Indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere. State institutions and their bureaucracies have controlled the reproduction of Indigenous heritage in education and general discussions to mimic an acceptable national social memory of Indigenous peoples as recent immigrants from the east, from Siberia or Asia. Although a few archaeologists argued for an earlier than 12,000 year before present presenc...
Cultural heritage is fundamental to individual and group identity, and is therefore protected, preserved, and otherwise managed through legislation and policy at all levels of government. In the past decade, greater attention has been placed on international codes of standards, practice, and ethics specific to heritage and archaeology, created by organizations such as the World Archaeological Congress, the International Congress on Monuments and Sites, and the United Nations Educational, S...
Over the past twenty-five years, numerous amendments and additions to heritage- and human rights-based statutes, regulations, and directives were enacted with the intent of legitimizing and increasing the incorporation of indigenous voices into the national historic preservation program of the United States. Generally speaking, this endeavour has been a successful one, with Native American communities establishing a more meaningful role in heritage management and exercising greater soverei...
After the First International Leprosy Conference in Berlin in 1897, many leprosy settlements in Asia were established by colonialists for medical quarantine purposes. Due to prevailing segregation laws, leprosy settlements were built in remote locations or on isolated islands for collective management and control during the colonial and postwar years. Even after the disease was proved to be curable and not contagious in the 1980s, lepers and their physical deformities are still treated as ...
Few Indigenous Peoples have control over their heritage, despite international recognition that they have “the right to maintain, protect and develop” it in accordance with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), 2007. In Canada, archaeological heritage falls under provincial jurisdiction. In Ontario, the Ontario Heritage Act (R.S.O. 1990) regulates archaeology and licenced archaeologists are “deputized” legally to care for the archaeological materials ...
Canada is not just a patchwork of varying heritage governance delineated by provincial and territorial boundaries, but a maelstrom of contesting and overlapping practices and processes originating from state and non-state actors. Where some contemporary scholarship seeks order out of perceived chaos, this paper will celebrate the diversity of heritage management environments and contends that modernity appears to be trending toward an era of customization and away from uniformity.