This forum will explore the current directions of critical heritage studies and what makes ACHS distinctive. Panel members will discuss what the term critical means to them, and what directions they would like to see develop in the future. To help develop an open dialogue, the session will also give considerable time to contributions from the audience.  

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...

Dans le cadre d’une réflexion pluridisciplinaire croisant anthropologie, archéologie, architecture, géographie, histoire, politologie, cette séance propose des lectures empiriques du patrimoine matériel et immatériel en situation conflictuelle. Le patrimoine sera interrogé en tant que construction sociale à valeur symbolique, catalyseur d’appropriation et/ou de fabrications identitaires et objet de discours mémoriels.   Dans des contextes politiques autoritaires, et où la contestat...

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...