Heritage- what is it?

My very short contribution to a discussion in course in the Wac list:

Heritage, be it cultural or natural, is a symptom of a typical Western ideology:

- the split of two realities - nature and culture

- the obsession with the archive - to frozen things and life, as identity anchors, to compensate the Loss (the loss of transcendence tied to modern Rationalism)

- the turn of the world into a museum - the connection of that with tourism and tourist industry - the Other as an economic resource

- heritage as cult - the relics, the pilgrimage, the recording, the storage, the trial to fabricate a personal and collective archive based on photos or digitalized documents

- the omnipresence of the media and of the image as constitutive of the public space

- heritage for all and for all kinds of leisure and the question of democracy - what does this word mean in a media society, when "reality" is hyperreality?

Etc. The subject is immense.

One book between thousands of others, this one n French:

Marc Guillaume, La Politique du Patrimoine, Paris, Galilée, 1980.