Who Makes It Heritage?

Abstract

Heritage can mean many things, but it is safe to say that it always has two core characteristics: value in someone’s eyes, and time depth. Whether natural or cultural, tangible or intangible, to be heritage something must have been around for awhile, and be regarded by someone as valuable. How do we decide that a given place, person, plant, or poem is old enough, and valuable enough, to be categorized as heritage? If we are an informal group of people, a family, or an individual, we may not really make a conscious decision to call something our heritage—we simply come to feel an attachment to it, an association with it. If we are a government, we have a more formal system: we typically set up an ostensibly authoritative body charged with developing and applying criteria by which heritage is recognized. We also charge this body with deciding which specific things in the world meet the criteria we have established, and we usually extend some kind of protection or management to heritage thus designated. We seldom apply these formal processes to all conceivable types of heritage; instead we carve out a subset of heritage phenomena to which our expert body will attend. The most popular subset, worldwide, is probably the class of heritage called “monuments” or “historic places” or “historic and archaeological sites”— physical expressions of past human activity. Another commonly recognized kind of heritage comprises natural phenomena that we think beautiful, rare, or expressive of some important process or processes. More rarely—as in Japan—we give official recognition to animals, specific people or groups of people, and such “intangible” things as songs and dance forms. We may also recognize folkways and other ways of life, though we seldom put them into exclusive lists. This sort of government-sponsored heritage recognition seems to be widely and uncritically accepted around the world—it is embodied in virtually every relevant UNESCO convention and recommendation, for instance—but a moment’s thought reveals it as rather strange, particularly when indulged in by an ostensibly democratic government. What conceivable business has a government agency telling a nation’s people what constitutes their heritage? Surely it should be the other way round—people should tell their government what their heritage is, and government should respect it to the extent feasible without major conflict with other values. Formal heritage designation inevitably means that heritage believed in by some groups of citizens will be found by government to be non-heritage, and therefore entitled to no respect in government planning or protection from pillage and destruction. I hear the objection: “We cannot preserve everything that anyone decides, for whatever whimsical reason, must be preserved.” But “preservation,” in the sense of complete protection in unchanged state, is not what many modern governmental heritage programs are about. Such programs certainly seek to extend the lives