What means "cultural heritage" - a brief note sent by me to 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 archive based on photos
the omnipresence of the media and of the image as constitutive of the public space
Etc – the subject is immense.
One book between thousands, in French for instance:
Marc Guillaume, La Politique du Patrimoine, Paris, Galilée, 1980.

___________
contact: WAC@flinders.edu.au