Cultural heritage is the set of objects, buildings, artifacts, places, stories and traditions that make up a people’s collective identity. It includes both tangible heritage (something you can see and touch, like art or monuments) and intangible heritage, such as music, dance and language.
Heritage is an asset for communities, which makes it important to consider how best to preserve and protect it. However, heritage preservation is a costly process, and many poor countries struggle to balance the need for preservation with other priorities such as education, health and infrastructure.
Increasingly, efforts are being made to bring greater rigour to the estimation of the economic and broader social value of heritage. Such efforts are essential for guiding governments on the importance of protecting and maintaining their heritage. But they are also vital for ensuring that the value of heritage is understood by the general public, and that it can serve as a unifying force in society.
A new paradigm of cultural heritage research is emerging, which seeks to move away from a disciplinary silo to an integrated and multidisciplinary approach, integrating the perspectives and methods of various disciplines including archaeology, history, geography, sociology, humanities and environmental sciences. This enables us to examine the complex interaction of cultural heritage with other aspects of society, and to identify commonalities and tensions.
Cultural heritage is the source of a community’s identity and its sense of belonging. It is the shared legacy that we inherit from our ancestors and pass on to future generations. In the modern world, we are faced with a growing number of threats to our cultural heritage. This is a result of globalization, urbanization and rising inequality. These threats range from climate change to human rights violations, war and natural disasters.
There is an urgent need to address these threats and find innovative ways of preserving our cultural heritage for future generations. However, we must first understand the nature of our heritage and the challenges it faces to determine how best to safeguard it.
A key challenge is that cultural heritage consists of a wide variety of assets, from monuments and historic cities to museums and sites. It encompasses both tangible and intangible heritage, and reflects the complex processes of selection and oblivion that characterize every human society. This includes choosing what should be preserved and what should be forgotten, as well as deciding how to share and manage the heritage among members of a community.
The challenge is even more acute for intangible cultural heritage, such as oral traditions, performing arts and local knowledge. Preserving these assets requires a different approach than preserving tangible heritage, such as putting in place a digital archive and introducing knowledge management systems to the field. This is a challenging task and it will require collaboration with different stakeholders, from the government to NGOs and private institutions. The goal is to build a cultural heritage management system that is as sustainable as it is effective.