Cultural Heritage: Creating and Preserving the Past

Catalog description

What is cultural heritage, and how do societies remember, preserve, and transmit it? This seminar-style class explores the history and politics of cultural heritage and conservation movements, examining the ways in which 'patrimony' (heritage) is used to create or contest cultural identities across the world. Through case studies, we will discuss why tangible and intangible heritage stir such emotion among diverse peoples, mobilizing political organizations, NGOs, tourists, museums, tomb raiders, and even armies to celebrate, protect, loot, commodify, efface, contest, and even go to war over artifacts and practices rooted in the past.