Heritage as a focus of research : past, present and new directions

Heritage is a version of the past received through objects and display, representations and engagements, spectacular locations and events, memories and commemorations, and the preparation of places for cultural purposes and consumption. Collectively, these ‘things’ and practices have played a central role in structuring and defining the way heritage is understood within academic debate, public policy and, subsequently, how it has been formalized as a focus of research over the last 30 years or so. Across this timeframe, the emphasis has undoubtedly changed from a concern with objects them- selves – their classification, conservation and interpretation – to the ways in which they are consumed and expressed as notions of culture, identity and politics. More recently, heritage scholars have also started to concern them- selves with processes of engagement and the construction of meaning, so that a post -post-structural, or more-than-representational, labyrinth of individuated, affective, experiential and embodied themes has started to emerge. As a consequence of these theoretical developments, the relatively long period of conceptual stability surrounding even critical notions of heritage is now starting to slip and disintegrate, with debates that we might have thought were finished now being revivified. ‘Authenticity’, ‘memory’, ‘place’, ‘representation’, ‘dissonance’ and ‘identity’, examples of the sorts of concepts that have been challenged or refreshed as new modes of thinking, drawn and applied from the wider social sciences, have started to stimulate new theoretical speculation. As Tunbridge et al. (2013, p. 368) have cogently suggested, there is, as a result, ‘even more need now for a rigorously defined intellectual core to heritage agreed across the disciplines involved’. These revivified debates have not just circled around particular issues or case studies; rather, they have introduced doubt and uncertainty into our very understanding of how heritage ought to be defined and addressed, and with which tradition of research methodology. With this level of intellectual upheaval in mind, heritage studies might seem to be a somewhat unsettled and unproductive field to be in at present. On the contrary, it is, instead, flourishing in its incompleteness, relishing the chance to rake over the coals and construct its own perspicuous criticisms from within – by those who are immersed in its projects. One of the implications of this emergent critique, of course, is that it is difficult to identify a specific heritage discourse without also signalling the theoretical orientation that is being employed from one of a number of academic disciplines, each with its own, often distinctive and evolving, research methodologies. Capturing this, along with something of the nature of heritage itself, is the object of this book.