We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 January 2018
My colleague Yujie Zhu recounted a tea ceremony he had attended in Canberra, Australia. At the ceremony was a student from Taiwan, a Chinese mainland tea expert, and a Japanese scholar. The Taiwanese student said, “Every time I drink this, it make me feel like I am back at home. It is like I am in Taiwan. I am feeling Taiwanese.” The Japanese scholar responded, “Yes, I can understand, but you know, this tea was actually influenced from Japan.” The tea expert then said, “Oh, interesting, because the tea is now sold as a Chinese tea.”
What this story tells us is that heritage-making is always fraught and contested. Indeed it is always political, not simply because its interpretation or history may be disputed, but because any assertion of inclusive heritage must also include an implicit assertion of exclusion — “this is who I am, and you are different from me”.
One of the significant assumptions that underpins both heritage management practices and heritage scholarship is that heritage is about identity. Heritage, in either its intangible or tangible form, is intuitively understood to be about the assertion and reinforcement of identity — be that associated with social, cultural, national, ethnic or other forms of identity. The link between heritage and identity is often simply taken for granted, and there is very little work that takes as its central task an analysis of the linkages between expressions of identity and heritage.
In attempting to reveal these links, I want to develop my argument that heritage is a cultural performance, in which the meaning of the past for the present is continually recreated and reinterpreted to address the political and social needs and problems of the present. Contra to the writings of David Lowenthal (1986, 1996) and Benedict Anderson (1991), heritage is neither a cult nor is it imagined or simply invented; rather it is part of a cultural and political performance and set of negotiations that has material consequences for a range of contemporary social problems.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
