The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Anthropology: Anthropologies of Cultural Heritage

Professor Oscar Salemink has contributed to The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Anthropology with the chapter ‘Anthropologies of Cultural Heritage’. In his chapter, Oscar Salemink explores the anthropological study of heritage.

Abstract:
Cultural heritage is often thought of as old and venerable, but anthropology does not take the existence of heritage for granted, as sites, objects or practices to be discovered and recorded by cultural experts and recognized by national or international agencies.

Instead, anthropologists focus on the processes by which sites, objects or practices become heritage; on the various community and institutional interests involved, including state, economic and cultural actors; on the variegated meanings that different actors project; on the wider discursive and regulatory environment that heritage inserts itself in; and on the political, economic, social, and cultural effects of such ‘heritagization’.

The distinctly anthropological contribution to the study of heritage is its critical focus on heritage as practice at the intersection of these various spatial and temporal, social and cultural, political and economic dimensions that combine to make the ‘local-and-global’ heritage regime.

The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Anthropology, edited by Lene Pedersen and Lisa Cliggett, is the first instalment of The SAGE Handbook of the Social Sciences series and encompasses major specialities as well as key interdisciplinary themes relevant to the field.

Read more about the book and order here: The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Anthropology