Heritage as a Concept through the Prism of Time
Journal Title: Social Evolution & History - Year 2015, Vol 14, Issue 2
Abstract
The present article focuses on the notion of ‘time’ and its definition. The notions of time and time-management are treated in terms of various concepts such as ‘continuity’, ‘momentum’, ‘cultural heritage’, ‘history’, etc. The author tries to analyze how time, as a concept and in practical terms, is identified, named and measured. The idea is to study the notion of time with respect to the cultural heritage concept shaped by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The author suggests that the necessity of heritage preservation and the ways to achieve this goal are both defined by the social actors via time-sensitive values. The ‘fabrication’ of tangible heritage is a complex process consisting in ‘locking the moment in a stone’, which breaks the continuity of time, creates a measuring unit that would make sense on a human lifetime scale but barely makes sense when considering history itself. This paper suggests that the evolution of technologies helps to focus on the question: How to save the past, leaving continuity untouched? It is now a foreseen future: the past1 is being converted into present. The paper also suggests that the cultural heritage list prepared and published by UNESCO is an important Foucauldian mechanism (‘dispositif’) where the consensus regarding the selection process itself is nonexistent: the process is aiming at identifying a ‘golden list’ of objects deserving to be saved in priority alongside with attempts to save the largest number of sites possible.
Authors and Affiliations
Tatiana Poddubnykh
Keywords
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