PUBLISHER

Berghahn Books

BOOK DESCRIPTION

Heritage processes vary according to cultural, national, geographical, and historical contexts. This volume is unique in that it is dedicated to approaching the analysis of heritage through the concepts of social movements. Adapting the latest developments in the field of social movements, the chapters examine the formation, use and contestation of heritage by various official, non-official and activist players and the spaces where such ongoing negotiations and contestation take place. By bringing social movements into heritage studies, the book advocates a shift of perspective in understanding heritage, one that is no longer bound by (at times arbitrary) divisions such as those assumed between the state and people or between experts and non-experts. 

REVIEWS

"This book significantly contributes to our understanding of the complexities of heritage in Asia. It broadens our horizons to look at issues of governance, state-society relations, and the institutional ways memory and material culture are politically negotiated. It reveals heritage as a series of movements, unpacking, elaborating and critiquing what that term means in different social settings. An exciting contribution to the examination of heritage in Asia."

Tim Winter, University of Western Australia, Professor of Critical Heritage studies, Author of Geocultural Power: China's Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the Twenty First Century 

"The book is a wake-up call for heritage practitioners who still too easily think of the material past as a static and unmediated record of times past. Heritage Movements in Asia reminds us that the heritage expert is only one among numerous players competing to inscribe meaning on the traces of the past embedded in the ground we all live on. As this book vividly illustrates, heritage activism, whether in the form of mass mobilisation or more intimate engagements, is what gives the material past its dynamism."

Denis Byrne, Author of Counterheritage: Critical Perspectives on Heritage Conservation in Asia 

"Looking at heritage processes through the lens of social movements, this volume adds a meaningful contribution to the growing literature of critical heritage studies." 

Neel Kamal Chapagain, Director of the Centre for Heritage Management, Ahmedabad University 

Buy book here.