Cultural heritage is a link to the past that offers a sense of identity and continuity. It defines who we are as a human family and shows our common path towards the future.
It includes monuments, buildings, works of art and sites that have outstanding universal value from a historical, architectural, commemorative, aesthetic or ethnological point of view.
Definition
Cultural heritage encompasses tangible and intangible cultural elements of a nation or community. It may include historic places, monuments and artifacts, languages and traditions, folklore, music, crafts and skills, and landscapes. This cultural heritage can be transmitted from generation to generation within a culture or community. It can also be shared among cultures, allowing them to interact and learn from each other. Examples of this sharing are the influence of Japanese prints on paintings by Paul Gauguin and African masks on homes built in Liberia.
Cultural heritage is often endangered by destruction, looting and illicit trafficking. It is important to educate people about the importance of cultural heritage and ways to protect it. This can be done through school and university curricula in disciplines like Anthropology, Archaeology, History, Art History, International Affairs, Law and Political Science. It is also possible to promote awareness by involving local communities in the effort to protect their cultural heritage.
Extent
What an official entity (like a government, museum or scholarly organization) defines as heritage may differ from what individuals consider to be cultural heritage. This is due to the fact that heritage is not one simple object or tradition, but rather the whole set of objects, traditions and values of a culture that make it unique. What a person may value as cultural heritage also depends on the individual’s background, education, privilege/marginalization and personal identity.
The notion of heritage also is a social construction that has both transnational and national dimensions: for instance, there is the international/global dimension reflected in the endless list of charters and conventions and the growing debate on heritage restitution. There is also the national/local dimension embodied in the progressive enlargement of the World Heritage List and the close link between regional/local communities and heritage issues.
Heritage is a constantly evolving entity that is created in response to a community’s religious, political and social environment. It provides the sense of a commonality and continuity that allows a community to identify itself in society.
Significance
A judgment as to the degree of cultural significance is inevitably subjective and it may be difficult to develop a method for evaluating heritage items. However, it is possible to use a variety of approaches, including comparing them against a set of criteria.
Sustainable cultural heritage involves communities becoming stewards of monuments, languages, and traditions and at the same time allowing others to experience them. These experiences drive demand for cultural tourism and in turn provide economic benefits that fund the preservation of the heritage.
This has led to researchers integrating cultural variables into formal econometric growth models. For instance, Kostakis et al. (2018) empirically investigates the relationship between cultural heritage assets and regional economic growth using a neoclassical model with GMM dynamic panel data for Greece. Their results show that the demand for cultural heritage is a significant factor in growth. The evidence also reveals a positive correlation between regional economic growth and the number of monument visitors.
Protection
The protection of cultural heritage is a complex task that requires balancing many factors. It involves both protecting cultural objects from damage or loss and allowing them to be used in the future by people who may not have experienced the culture that created them. It also involves ensuring that people are not subjected to discrimination and abuse when accessing or utilizing cultural heritage.
The preservation of cultural heritage depends on the ability to communicate its significance. This is difficult when the object has been altered or destroyed. It is also important to protect cultural property from illicit trafficking. Illicit trafficking can threaten the cultural integrity of an entire country and can be detrimental to humanity.
A more robust international system would allow for the protection of cultural heritage across borders. However, Borck has argued that a desire to engage in interventionist protection could contribute to particular future histories by underrepresenting and denaturalizing societies with horizontal power structures.