Books in the Elements in Critical Heritage Studies series

This Element looks at the relationship between heritage and design by way of a case study approach. It offers up ten distinct portraits of a range of heritage makers located in Goa, a place that has been predicated on its difference, both historical and cultural, from the rest of India. A former Portuguese colonial enclave (1510-1961) surrounded by what was formerly British India (1776-1947), the author attempts to read Goa's heritage as a form of place-ness, a source of inspiration for further design work that taps into the Goa of the twenty-first century. The series of portraits are visual, literary, and sensorial, and take the reader on a heritage tour through a design landscape of villages, markets, photography festivals, tailors and clothing, books, architecture, painting, and decorative museums. They do so in order to explore heritage futures as increasingly dependent on innovation, design, and the role of the individual.

This research examines how museums and heritage sites can embrace a social justice approach to tackle inequalities and how they can empower disadvantaged groups to take an equal benefit from cultural resources. This Element argues that heritage institutions can use their collections of material culture more effectively to respond to social issues, and examines how they can promote equal access to resources for all people, regardless of their backgrounds. This research examines heritage and museum practices, ranging from critical and democratic approaches to authoritarian practices to expose the pitfalls and potentials therein. By analysing case studies, examining institutions' current efforts and suggesting opportunities for further development with regard to social justice, this Element argues that heritage sites and museums have great potential to tackle social issues and to create a platform for the equal redistribution of cultural resources, the recognition of diversities and the representation of diverse voices.

This Element explores how far past wrongs can be remedied through compensatory mechanisms involving material culture. It goes beyond a critique of global heritage brokers such as UNESCO, the ICC and museums as redundant, Eurocentric and elitist to explore why these institutions have become the focus for debates about global heritage justice.

With empirical touchstones from Europe, North America, Africa, Asia and the Pacific, the authors argue that heritage and property represent different approaches to subject formation, produce distinct bodies of expertise, and belong to different rationalities of government in a global patrimonial field: that cultural property is a technology of sovereignty, part of the order of the modern liberal state, but cultural heritage a technology of reformation that cultivates responsible subjects and entangles them in networks of expertise and management. While particular case trajectories may shift back and forth from rights-based claims and resolutions under the sign of cultural property to ethical claims and solutions under the sign of cultural heritage, the authors contend that there is significant analytical purchase to be gained from their distinction. Using a critical, comparative approach, they make the case for a historically grounded and theoretically informed understanding of the difference between the two terms.

As one of the world's fastest growing industries, heritage tourism is surrounded by political and ethical issues. This research explores the social and political effects and implications of heritage tourism through several pertinent topics. It examines the hegemonic power of heritage tourism and its consequences, the spectre of nationalism and colonialism in heritage-making, particularly for minorities and indigenous peoples, and the paradox of heritage tourism's role in combating these issues. Drawing from global cases, the study addresses a range of approaches and challenges of empowerment within the context of heritage tourism, including cultural landscapes, intangible heritage and eco-museums. The research argues that heritage tourism has the potential to develop as a form of co-production. It can be used to create a mechanism for community-centred governance that integrates recognition and interpretation and promotes dialogue, equity and diversity.

In the past decades cultural heritage stored at museums and archives has been returned to source communities in various forms and under diverse circumstances. This contribution to the Elements series explores and discusses specifically the return of digital 'ethnographic' images to indigenous and non indigenous people that share a common recent history of coexistence and dispute over the same territory that is to be understood in the light of the consolidation of a Nation State with a settler colonial logic. The author argues that the affective reception of what a given archive labels as tangible and intangible heritage varies according to each audience's particular memory practices, historical experience and way of relating to shared hegemonic notions of 'whiteness' and 'indigeneity'.

Exhibitions of Islamic artefacts in European museums have since 1989 been surrounded by a growing rhetoric of cultural tolerance, in response to the dissemination of images of Islam as misogynist, homophobic and violent. This has produced a new public context for exhibitions of Islam and has led to major recent investments in new galleries for Islamic artefacts, often with financial support from the Gulf and Saudi Arabia. This Element addresses contemporary framings of Islam in European museums, focusing on how museums in Germany and the UK with collections of Islamic heritage realise the ICOM (International Council of Museums) definition of museums as institutions in the service of society. The authors find that far too often the knowledge of Islamic cultural heritage is disconnected from contemporary developments in museum transformations, as well as from the geopolitical contexts they are a response to.

This study examines how an artist construed himself as cultural heritage by the turn of the 19th century, how this heritage was further construed after his death, and how the artworks can be made to further new approaches and insights through a digital archive (aroseniusarchive.se). The study employs the concept of 'staging' to capture the means used by the artist, as well as by reception, in this construal. The question of 'staging' involves not only how the artist has been called forth from the archives, but also how the artist can be called forth in new ways today through digitization. The study first elaborates on the theoretical framework through the aspects of mediation and agency, then explores how the artist was staged after his death. Finally, the artist's own means of staging himself are explored. Swedish painter Ivar Arosenius (1878-1909) is the case studied.

This Element surveys the convergences of religious and heritage traditions. It argues that the critical heritage turn has not adequately considered the legacy of secularism that underpins the history and contemporary practices of heritage preservation.

Drawing on interviews with Indigenous American visitors to UK museum displays and collections between 2017 and 2019, this Element highlights the most significant inadequacies of contemporary engagement with Native American visitors and communities, identifying fundamental problems rooted in the ethos of collection management and display.