Neoliberalism, Heritage Regimes, and Cultural Rights

Abstract

First, we move beyond the narrow understanding of neoliberalism characteristic of heritage studies to delineate dimensions of the critical study of neoliberalism particularly relevant to understanding heritage governance under conditions in which culture is a resource for new forms of capital accumulation. Rights‐based practices and discourses function as a means by which the limits of governmentality are expressed by peoples who bring their own cultural resources to bear upon governmental demands that they bear culture as a resource. Such social articulations serve to enlarge rights‐based discourse and practice in fields of heritage politics. Heritage scholars can only recognize such struggles to the extent that they move beyond a formalist and institutionally based understanding of human rights, adopting and adapting the perspectives of legal and cultural anthropologists who have fundamentally transformed social science understandings of human rights since the turn of the century.