Cultural heritage encompasses a nation’s or community’s historical places, monuments and buildings, works of art, traditions and folklore, languages and landscapes. It also includes a country’s natural heritage, encompassing its countryside and its wildlife.
The preservation of cultural heritage requires both the public and private sector. Threats to heritage include illicit trafficking of artifacts, pillaging of archaeological sites and the destruction of historic buildings and monuments.
Definition
Cultural heritage encompasses the historical and artistic legacy of a nation or community. It is an inheritance passed on from generation to generation, consisting of natural, built and archaeological sites, museums, monuments, artworks and historic cities as well as oral traditions and community bonds.
It is also the accumulated culture and knowledge that characterizes a specific society, expressing the spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of humankind. It is both tangible and intangible, but the former typically refers to the physical artifacts – clothing, tools, books and manuscripts – and the latter to the skills and knowledge embedded in them, which are intergenerationally transmitted.
In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the preservation of cultural heritage and its sustainable management. While the training of people to work with cultural heritage is still largely focused on academic disciplines like archaeology and art history, preserving this heritage is not possible without a broader approach combining multidisciplinary expertise.
Origins
Cultural heritage is the legacy of physical artifacts and intangible attributes that a society has valued, maintained over time and bestowed for the benefit of future generations. It also includes the knowledge and skills that are inherited through generations such as language, music, dance, traditions, customs and values.
The concept of cultural heritage has become increasingly important as countries struggle with new kinds of threats to their heritage. In the post-World War II era, the appetite of the international art market for archaeological objects prompted many nations to develop legal means to conserve their heritage at home.
However, even with these measures, cultural heritage is vulnerable to damage and loss. Illicit trafficking in artifacts, pillaging of archaeological sites and the destruction of historical buildings and monuments all cause irreparable damage to a nation’s heritage. This damage is often motivated by a desire to build a new vision of a country’s identity, such as the destruction of monuments from the Communist past in Eastern Europe or a purified reading of Islam by the Taliban and ISIS.
Significance
The significance of cultural heritage is a social construct. It arises when a physical object embodies and celebrates a narrative central to a particular community’s self-understanding. As such, its ownership is always multiple. Objects can be contested and destroyed, as we saw when the mosques of Eastern Europe were destroyed to make way for new societies based on purified readings of Islam.
The sense of significance can change dramatically over time, as communities and individuals choose which elements to preserve or discard. This process is often triggered by disasters, war and conflict, or by shifts in political systems or values.
Sustainable cultural heritage focuses on the communities that live with the heritage to ensure that it is conserved for future generations. This includes empowering those communities to become stewards of their own heritage, as well as encouraging people from outside the community to experience it. The ecological concept of sustainability provides a possible framework for this approach: just as sustainable energy involves finding ways to produce and consume energy without harming nature, the same principle can be applied to culture.
Conservation
The physical preservation of cultural heritage is a vital part of preserving the culture that created it. However, many factors can make this a difficult task. These include commodification and over-tourism, as well as irreversible destruction caused by wars or natural disasters.
The UNESCO definition of cultural heritage includes monuments, buildings, sites and areas, works of man-made creativity or the combined work of nature and man, that have Outstanding Universal Value from a historical, architectural, commemorative, aesthetic, ethnological or anthropological point of view. This definition also includes movable cultural property.
The concept of sustainability is an important idea in the context of cultural heritage conservation. Just like the ecological idea of sustainability, which maintains the environmental conditions that humans and nature need to co-exist, the cultural principle of sustainability aims to ensure that humankind’s legacy will endure for generations to come. This will require both the preservation of cultural heritage and the transmission of its values to new generations.