Heritage Futures, Prefiguration and World Heritage

Abstract

Heritage futures are about the roles of heritage in managing the relations between present and future societies, e.g. through anticipation and planning. This topic has only rarely been addressed in the heritage sector and its literature (Högberg et al. 2017), although this is now changing (see especially Harrison et al. forthcoming; Holtorf and Högberg forthcoming a). It is surprising that critical heritage studies and heritage management are only now beginning to take seriously the consequences for the future of temporal variation in interpreting and using heritage. By now it has become widely accepted that key concepts of heritage management and interpretation such as ownership, authenticity, use and value are culturally specific and variable in space. But it has not yet been fully understood that they are also variable over time, with important consequences for the possible impacts of heritage on future societies and thus how we might best manage heritage today for the benefit of future generations (Holtorf and Kono 2015). Recently, the archaeological anthropologist Lewis Borck (2018) presented a very interesting discussion of heritage practices as future-making, addressing exactly these questions. From his perspective, archaeology is political practice and should always acknowledge its political nature. Studying patterns in the selection of World Heritage sites in North America and the Caribbean as a case-study, Borck argues that “archaeologists use the past in the present to construct a history for the production of the future” (2018: 232). He links his discussion not only to current work on the politics of collective memory in relation to history, archaeology and heritage but also to a body of social theory including George W. Wallis’ sociological notion of chronopolitics and Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s concept of chronotopes, originally developed in literary theory (Borck 2018: 234-235). Borck is particularly interested in discussing patterns of constructing future history.