The politics of heritage

This handbook presents multiple perspectives on the interaction of heritage and politics, where heritage is understood broadly and variously to mean not just the tangible and intangible phenomena that are often named as heritage, but also the ways in which people and societies live with, embody, experience, value, and use the past, and how they make sense, meaning and cause from it, whether consciously or unconsciously. In this expanded sense, heritage is active within contemporary conditions of existence at all scales. We understand politics as the exercise and contestation of power at a range of scales. However, heritage and politics are what Walter Bryce Gallie (1964) might have comprehended as “essentially contested” concepts invested with ever-evolving competing meanings subject to constant interrogation. If this is the case, then this handbook cannot be the final word on either concept or their combination, although our contributors advance necessarily located and time-bound understandings to enable new insights.