The Future Challenges of Heritage and Identity in a Globalized World

  • Douglas C. Comer
  • Peter F. Biehl
  • Christopher Prescott
  • Hilary A. Soderland
Chapter
Part of the SpringerBriefs in Archaeology book series (BRIEFSARCHAE)

Abstract

Heritage and identity studies provide a voice for archaeology and anthropology in ongoing conversations among academic disciplines that have, in recent decades, significantly influenced policy and decision making at national and global levels. Contributors to this book have written about how the past is introduced into the present. Implicit in each chapter is the position that the past is indeed prologue if it is not cast as unrelated events, and that heritage knits together past events in a pattern that is inevitably used to imagine and therefore set a course for the future. Heritage can do this for individual communities that are united by local concerns in ways designed to privilege those communities, but it can also be informed by archaeology and anthropology, becoming a means by which to generate the global public good of knowledge. Many realms of scholarship concerned with the ways that humans are organized into societies, including economics, political science, and legal studies, have borrowed heavily from anthropology in developing arguments and positions that are now elemental in public discourse. A review of how this was done suggests the challenges that must be met in order to reinvigorate the use of archaeological materials in an anthropological approach to heritage and identity for the intellectual and practical benefit of academe and the public at large.

Keywords

World Heritage World Heritage Site Political Objective Global Public Good Heritage Management 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Copyright information

© The Author(s) 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  • Douglas C. Comer
    • 1
  • Peter F. Biehl
    • 3
  • Christopher Prescott
    • 4
  • Hilary A. Soderland
    • 2
  1. 1.Cultural Site Research and Management, Inc.BaltimoreUSA
  2. 2.University of Washington School of LawSeattleUSA
  3. 3.University at Buffalo, The State University of New YorkBuffaloUSA
  4. 4.University of OsloOsloNorway

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