Heritage Keywords
320 pages, 6 x 9
18
Paperback
Release Date:01 Sep 2015
ISBN:9781607323839
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Heritage Keywords

Rhetoric and Redescription in Cultural Heritage

University Press of Colorado

Situated at the intersection of scholarship and practice, Heritage Keywords positions cultural heritage as a transformative tool for social change. This volume unlocks the persuasive power of cultural heritage—as it shapes experiences of change and crafts present and future possibilities from historic conditions—by offering new ways forward for cultivating positive change and social justice in contemporary social debates and struggles. It draws inspiration from deliberative democratic practice, with its focus on rhetoric and redescription, to complement participatory turns in recent heritage work.

Through attention to the rhetorical edge of cultural heritage, contributors to this volume offer innovative reworkings of critical heritage categories. Each of the fifteen chapters examines a key term from the field of heritage practice—authenticity, civil society, cultural diversity, cultural property, democratization, difficult heritage, discourse, equity, intangible heritage, memory, natural heritage, place, risk, rights, and sustainability—to showcase the creative potential of cultural heritage as it becomes mobilized within a wide array of social, political, economic, and moral contexts.

This highly readable collection will be of interest to students, scholars, and professionals in heritage studies, cultural resource management, public archaeology, historic preservation, and related cultural policy fields.

Contributors include Jeffrey Adams, Sigrid Van der Auwera, Melissa F. Baird, Alexander Bauer, Malcolm A. Cooper, Anna Karlström, Paul J. Lane, Alicia Ebbitt McGill, Gabriel Moshenska, Regis Pecos, Robert Preucel, Trinidad Rico, Cecelia Rodéhn, Joshua Samuels, Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels, and Klaus Zehbe.


A diverse array of approaches to the central concepts and issues in the field of heritage, which, taken together, offers compelling and valuable commentary.’
—Lena Mortensen, University of Toronto

'An important contribution to this newly emerging interdisciplinary field.’
—Rodney Harrison, University College London

'[R]elevant and valuable for anthropology as a discipline. . . . the volume is exemplary in its commitment to language as a mode of thought and to rhetoric as a mode of language. Future studies of disciplinary vocabularies and key words—of which there will surely be many—should follow the example here and make serious note of the rhetorical effects of language in academia and national politics and of how, as Rorty taught, changes of thought and practice are often only possible through and as changes in speech.'
Anthropology Review Database

'Heritage Keywords will prove useful for students grappling with anthropological heritage studies and should encourage even more productive investigations of the continuing expanding heritage phenomenon.'
Anthropology Book Forum

'[T]he first of its kind to not only produce a useful reference of key concepts in the field, but to induce the readers to question and rethink them. Heritage Keywords is a welcomed text that clearly aims to discuss and not define, deconstruct rather than describe. . . . This volume, it is hoped, will motivate scholars and practitioners inside and outside the museum and heritage spheres to think critically and reflexively about the words they use, the power enacted through such rhetoric, and the situated nature of their expertise.'
—Museum Anthropology Review

 'A successful edited volume that shoulders aside calls for a (merely) discursive turn in heritage studies by demonstrating the capabilities of rhetoric’s inbuilt attention to dynamism and agency.'
—JCA Book Reviews

Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Maryland, and her research examines cultural heritage in the transnational sphere: within international economic development, democracy building, human rights, and global climate change. She is coeditor of Cultures of Contact: Archaeology, Ethics, and Globalization and Making Roman Places: Past and Present.

Trinidad Rico is assistant professor of anthropology at Texas A&M University at Qatar. Her broad research interests include critical heritage theory, the construction of risk and expertise, and the mobilization of Islamic values in cultural heritage. She is coeditor of Cultural Heritage in the Arabian Peninsula: Debates, Discourses, and Practices.


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