Heritopia World Heritage and Modernity

Heritopia creatively investigates the meaning of the past in the present, using Abu Simbel and other World Heritage sites as points of departure. It paves the way for a new discourse about pastness, heritage and society. In doing so, it overcomes the division between critical heritage inquiry and the world of heritage management.

Heritopia is an original inquiry into World Heritage and modernity. While its author is an archaeologist, the book ranges widely across a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, social sciences, and the arts.

Using the famous temples of Abu Simbel and other World Heritage sites as a point of departure, the book explores multiple meanings of the past in the present. It employs three perspectives: the truth of knowledge, the beauties of narrative, and ethical demands. Crisis theories are rejected as nostalgic expressions of contemporary social criticism. Modernity is viewed as a collection of contradictory narratives and reinterpreted as an enlightened combination of technological progress and recently evolved ideas. The book resists the notion that heritage is everywhere and that it constitutes a problem. It investigates the World Heritage Convention as an innovation, demonstrating that the definition of a World Heritage site succeeds in creating a tenable category of outstanding and exclusive heritage.

Introducing the term Heritopia in order to conceptualise the utopian expectations associated with World Heritage, the book points to possibilities of using the past creatively when meeting present-day and future challenges.

Heritopia investigates the meanings of the past in the present, focusing on Abu Simbel in Egypt and other World Heritage sites. It explores and resolves a number of paradoxes: the past is impossible to preserve for eternity; all preservation implies change; preservation of one site normally means destruction of others; threats are important in the creation of heritage, but at the same time heritage may become a threat and threats can become heritage themselves; heritage stands in contrast to modernity and is at the same time part of it; both the increase and the decrease of modernity create heritage; and finally, heritage may be global and local at the same time. Heritopia will appeal to students and professionals in heritage studies and related subjects such as archaeology, history, ethnology and museology.

An electronic version of this book is available under a creative commons licence: manchesteropenhive.com/view/9789198469943/9789198469943.xml