Borders of Heritage | Frontières du Patrimoine

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 overcome them? Or is the critical turn in heritage studies better served by not overcoming differences but simply making them more transparent: is it actually the multiplicity of approaches created by borders which offers a heuristic tool in itself? Hence, secondly we will investigate the fluidity of borders in a longer trajectory, by looking at the history of transfers of ideas, people and objects across national and cultural borders historically in different contexts. What factors helped increase flow at particular moments? How did these transfers change and transform ideas about heritage lastingly? Yet, while the growing transnational research has helped us over the last years to better understand the cross-border dimension of heritage, this has sometimes let to overlooking the physical and mental barriers to flows. Therefore the session will thirdly look at the solidity of borders, by focusing on borderlands in different geographical, linguistic and historical contexts. How have physical borders, and the performativity of the border in conflict and peace, been affecting ideas of heritage not only in borderlands, but in the centre of nations and transnationally? Is each border unique, or can commonalities be discerned in different context and times? To answer these questions, this session invites scholarly contributions from different disciplines, national academic traditions and linguistic contexts to approach borders as an object of study and as a heuristic tool for a better understanding of the role of cultural particularization versus globalization and other transnational processes relating to heritage.