Cultural heritage is a complex concept, and the values associated with it can be difficult to quantify. This article explores how this can be done using a range of techniques.
Cultural heritage encompasses both material and intangible objects, buildings, sites and landscapes, as well as a variety of other artifacts that are imbued with meaning. It also includes a wide range of human activities and expressions.
Intangible Cultural Heritage
Intangible cultural heritage is “the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge and skills, including instruments, objects and cultural spaces associated with them, that generations, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage.” It provides people with a sense of identity and continuity. It promotes respect for human creativity.
In contrast to physical or tangible heritage such as buildings, historic places and monuments, intangible cultural heritage is living and dynamic. It adapts to changing circumstances and connects the community that identifies with it.
A good example is the Ifa Divination System of Yoruba, which has been adapted to reflect changing times. In 2008, this tradition was inscribed on the UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Its recognition is a step toward reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. It’s also a reminder that intangible cultural heritage is not just a cultural asset for its own sake, but can be a tool for social justice and community well-being.
Material Cultural Heritage
Material cultural heritage includes any physical objects that convey important social and historical information, including monuments, town sites, archaeological sites, works of art, personal items, heirlooms and clothing. It also encompasses items like money, property documents, furniture and weapons, as well as any other material objects that are part of a culture’s tradition and history. The study of such objects, often referred to as material culture studies, is an essential part of anthropology and archaeology.
Research into material culture is a vast and ever-expanding field that spans a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, history, conservation, folklore and literary studies. It explores the relationships between people and their objects, looking at their functions, uses and meanings. These scholarly findings are used to develop and apply technology for preserving physical cultural heritage sites by deciphering their contents and enabling their digital preservation. It also offers the potential for enhancing interpretation of these sites. What a person or group considers as their heritage may vary based on their culture, beliefs, background and other factors, such as wealth, privilege and marginalization.
Cultural Landscapes
Cultural landscapes showcase the ways in which people interact with their natural environments. Whether it is an agricultural landscape, an urban area, or a sacred site, these places reflect the values and traditions of a culture. They also demonstrate the reciprocal relationship between culture and nature, where culture adapts to environmental conditions while altering those conditions.
The concept of cultural landscapes has become a scientific discipline within geography and has spread across linguistic boundaries into other fields such as history, archaeology, anthropology and even landscape ecology. It has also been used to explore the notion of heritage, which can be defined as “a social construction whose boundaries are unstable and blurred” (Champion, 2003: 194).
Many cultural landscapes function as palimpsests, where a layer of culture is imposed over an older one. Geographers may find traces of these previous layers in the form of ruins, monuments or place names. These traces may help them determine if the landscape is culturally significant and worth protecting.
Cultural Heritage Management
The field of cultural heritage management encompasses the collection, preservation and exhibition of material culture and intangible traditions and knowledge. The practice is also about the development and implementation of strategies to protect the world’s cultural heritage from threats like illicit trafficking, robbery, destruction, and neglect.
It also concerns the attribution of value to cultural heritage. In this context, the restitution and repatriation of collections has been a major issue in museum practice, especially for those museums that hold objects that were once the property of a colonial power.
Moreover, the concept of heritage has been broadened to include cultural values that are not associated with specific places but with the culture and beliefs of living communities. This new approach, analyzed by Kuanghan Li and others, enables previously unacknowledged forms of cultural heritage to gain official recognition and protection. Other authors explore the broader issues of patrimonialization as a process of heritage appropriation, nationalism and territorialization (see for example Ayala, 2014). Likewise, they point to the need to recognize culturally specific ways of valuing heritage, preventing its internationalized values from being imposed on communities.