The world is full of traces of the past, ranging from things as different as monuments and factories to farms, eco-museums, landscapes, mountaineering and even woven-grass bridges. These traces must be protected and passed on to future generations.
Communicational analysis shows that these traces have acquired the status of heritage by becoming communicative beings imbued with a new social life. Up until the 1970s and 1980s, granting this status was the prerogative of the state. New modes then emerged, increasingly involving social actors and the publicization of knowledge. Today, the heritage recognition of these traces also depends on interpretative schemes that circulate in society, notably through the media.
Heritage Traces in the Making is aimed at anyone - researchers, professionals and students - who is interested in how heritage is created and how it evolves.
Table of Contents
Introduction: A Communicational Analysis of Modes of Heritagization ix
Chapter 1 Analyzing Heritage Traces in Media Texts 1
1.1 The documentary, a media publicization text 2
1.1.1 An original form of publicization: mediatized mediation 2
1.1.2 Interpreting the traces of a social world 6
1.2 Specificities of archaeological heritage 14
1.2.1 Knowledge on the life of engravings 15
1.2.2 Issues around the heritage value of the engravings 17
1.3 Aborigines and engravings: another heritagization mode? 20
1.3.1 Archaeological interpretation of the Aborigines’ relationship to engravings 22
1.3.2 The engravings, "Aboriginal heritage"? 26
1.3.3 Challenging the archaeological heritagization mode 30
1.4 To sum up: value of the method and exemplification of the approach 33
Chapter 2 Interpreting Traces, the Principle of Heritagization 35
2.1 The Inventory, a new heritagization dispositif 38
2.1.1 The Inventory, between autography and allography 40
2.1.2 Knowledge production and the typicity principle 43
2.1.3 Translating realia into documents 45
2.1.4 The heritage object as a genre 47
2.1.5 The Inventory, matrix of a new relationship to heritage? 50
2.2 Heritage in the face of the interpretation of national memory 54
2.2.1 Investigation extended to the inscription of memory in places 55
2.2.2 Institution of the administrative legal heritagization mode 61
2.2.3 Heritage, between historical memory and collective memory 66
2.2.4 Reexamining the 1970s mutation 69
2.3 In summary: the precursors of a mutation 73
Chapter 3 The Social Heritagization Mode 77
3.1 A criticism of "transmission in action" 80
3.1.1 Industrial heritage, an example of transmission in action 81
3.1.2 "Transmission in action" and social heritagization 83
3.2 Social heritagization as transmission in action 88
3.2.1 The Creusot ecomuseum, a project for "total" transmission in action 89
3.2.2 A "population" that has become synonymous with "audiences" 95
3.2.3 Community museologies and the ecomuseum model 97
3.2.4 The ethnological intervention and heritage as an experience 101
3.3 Representing practices through memory and traces 105
3.3.1 The enunciation of memory and the heritagization of testimony 106
3.3.2 Mediation by memory bearers and reconstructed "memory" 111
3.3.3 From collection of testimony to exhibition of the witness 114
3.4 In conclusion: social heritagization, a new reference 120
Chapter 4 Heritagizing Social Processes 123
4.1 A new category of cultural heritage created by UNESCO 125
4.1.1 The ideal scenario for inscription of the heritage element 127
4.1.2 Multiple operational scenarios 130
4.1.3 A critical analysis of the establishment of an ambiguous category 131
4.1.4 Heritagization gestures dispersed among several actors 134
4.2 Translating the cultural element into a heritage object 137
4.2.1 Writing the scholarly representation 139
4.2.2 Maintaining the practice in its usual functioning 143
4.2.3 The observer position between practice and scholarly representation 147
4.3 The intangible heritage object, a media text 152
4.3.1 The production of the process as a heritage trace 153
4.3.2 "In presence" activation 159
4.3.3 Mediatized publicization 162
4.4 To recap: producing traces to construct a continuity 172
Chapter 5 Heritagizing Complex Entities 175
5.1 Understanding the production of complex heritage entities 176
5.1.1 Producing heritage entities through the textualization of traces 177
5.1.2 Heritagizing a complex social entity: urban heritage 186
5.2 Toward a new mode of heritagization: the example of the landscape 195
5.2.1 How do we study the heritage character of a landscape? 195
5.2.2 Landscapes produced by knowledge 201
5.2.3 Landscape maintenance 212
5.2.4 Publicization and heritage interpretive schemes 219
5.3 In conclusion: interpretive schemes and media heritagization 228
Cited Works 237
Glossary 263
Index of Author Names 271
