240105 SE Critical Perspectives on Cultural Heritage (P4) (2015S)

The course will comprise a series of eight seminars on topics that constitute critical perspectives on contemporary Cultural Heritage studies. A central objective here is to align with a wider scholarship committed to disrupting the ‘Eurocentrism’ which continues to dominate cultural heritage theory/ practice and also with a contemporary ‘politics of recognition’ which is bound up in articulating new, alternative or ‘parallel’ characterisations of heritage value. Anthropologists should play a central role in these debates and yet the global importance of cultural heritage as new ‘civilisational’ discourses in China, India and elsewhere suggest the subject is held back by its continuing reluctance to critically engage with what has been termed the abundance of heritage in our late-modern world and its social, economic and political function in contemporary global societies. Why has heritage become such an omnipresent cultural phenomenon and what concepts and approaches are necessary for understanding this trend ?. Some of the topics we will engage with to develop such ‘toolkit of concepts’ will be

- Chartering the ‘Rise’ of ‘World’ Heritage: Golden Ages, ‘Redemptive Formulas’ and Global Agencies
- Archival Imaginations and the Cultures of Collecting:
- Heritage and Destruction: New Perspectives on Iconoclasm and the Past in the Present
- Exhibiting Cultures: Colonising Identities, Postcolonial Transformations and the Limits of Representation

- Intangible Heritage: Rethinking Performance and ‘Living’ Traditions
- Indigenising Heritage: Cultural Rights and Wrongs
- Negative Heritage: Representation and Commemoration of Dark or Painful Pasts