Heritage Time, the Next Zeitgeist. A Response to Cornelius Holtorf’s “Heritage Futures, Prefiguration and World Heritage”

Abstract

Cornelius Holtorf raises an important issue that lingers unresolved in the study of heritage and preservation – the lack of examination of temporal variation that is mobilized in heritage discourse and practice and, in particular, a neglect of future-oriented projections. But the examination of temporality and its variations has been extensively featured in the academic literature that supports the growth of heritage studies. Time has been discussed as a formative element of heritage discourse (e.g., Lowenthal 1975; Harvey 2001), recognized as underpinning various rhetorical devices in the lexicon for heritage preservation (see essays in Lafrenz-Samuels and Rico 2015), and acknowledged as a factor affecting styles of conservation (e.g., Price 2000). Moreover, the study of temporalities has been critical to anthropological training in heritage studies: for example, Gavin Lucas argues in support of a study of practices of temporalizing, such as the examination of preservation strategies that take heritage resources “out of the flow of time” (2005, 130), while Andreas Huyssen (1995) and Eviatar Zerubavel (2003) place temporal framing center-stage for the study of heritage as a practice of past mastering. However, the study of temporalities in heritage preservation debates and practices confronts the seemingly unreconcilable tension between a pastlooking discourse and various forward-looking practices: conservation standards to manage future change; policy that anticipates the effects of natural and human-made disasters; and other safeguarding traditions that focus on the betterment of future society, such as waqf endowments (Sabri 2015). Therefore, I agree that a formal and critical study of ‘heritage time’ in the context of futurity, as it has already begun (Zetterstrom-Sharp 2015; Stainforth and Graham 2017), is an exciting chapter in the growth of heritage studies.