Heritage: Critical Approaches

Heritage Studies is a newly emerging discipline that seeks to offer critical analyses of the cultural work that societies undertake around valuing aspects of the past. It can refer to architecture of historical interest, various forms of material culture and collections, landscapes and nature settings, biodiversity, monuments, and historic human practices. The discipline is emerging from the interface of a series of academic disciplines including archaeology, anthropology, art history, architectural history, geography, sociology, history, literature studies, subaltern and multicultural studies. Discourses of sustainability and biodiversity are also increasingly employed in relation to natural heritage in a range of different disciplines. Despite its fragmented, cross-disciplinary nature, a new critical literature around heritage has begun to develop over the past two decades, often within the individual fields discussed above and without detailed reference to the others. New Critical Heritage Studiesprovides a concise and accessible overview of this field which it defines as 'the new critical heritage studies', outlining its origins and bringing together an overview of its key texts for the first time in a single volume. The book introduces the informed general and undergraduate reader to the burgeoning new field of critical heritage studies, distilling key information from a range of disparate sources, and creates a new critical agenda for the academic study of heritage in the contemporary world. This book will itself become a key resource in defining the field of study and setting a new agenda for critical heritage studies in the twenty first century.