Heritagisation: A community will be as a community does.

From Cyril Isnart; Investigador Auxiliar Convidado; Universidade de Évora; Centro Interdisciplinar de História, Culturas e Sociedades; Évora, Portugal; to my friend and mentor Rory Turner to NAC:

The notion of heritage is surely one of the best tools social scientists have at their disposal to analyse how societies deal with their past, especially regarding their complex and ambiguous relationship with history and memory. However, heritage is also a way of constructing our present and locality, in transnational contexts as much as in local communities.

The recent concepts of Biodiversity, Cultural Diversity or Intangible Cultural Heritage proposed by Unesco to defend non-architectural heritage have met with considerable success, reinforce the centrality of such principles as loss, safeguard, and development that have already changed the social and economic landscapes of sites classified as World Heritage.

However, critical views on heritagisation are strikingly uncommon because heritage, either material, natural or immaterial, is often looked upon as authentic or irreducible civilisational testimony, as well as a real powerful tourism-related tool of economic development. Heritage is generally studied and used by specialists in charge of it (curators, politicians, economic agents or associations) as a «corpus» *per se*, to be considered and valorised as a mere ‘civilisational trace’ , cut off from the social, historical and cultural context that produced it. The constitution of museum collections or the publication of Unesco’s world heritage lists are nevertheless the result of an act of classification whose criteria are as much reliant on cultural and historical factors and the people involved in selecting and manipulating heritage, as it has been observed in other social phenomena, such as kinship, religion and economy.

In other words, the potential elevation of natural, material and immaterial items to a heritage status – and the effects this may have – must be taken and analysed as a social fact like any other. The recent development of heritage studies inside academia and the growing interest in heritage outside of it offer an ideal opportunity to think heritagisation as a social practice and a world view, inscribed in the bricolage dynamics that we find thriving between the global and the local, between history, memory and identity.

In other other words, "How does the idea of spending more than $500,000 on restoring the Cardinal Ritter house appear to the residents of the transitional neighborhood surrounding it?" It's not a harsh judgment. It's a question relevant to all of our futures.

Correspondingly, the Ritter House may be a convenient, recent example but the principles are readily transferable.

What do the neighbors think? How did they get to be neighbors? Who will be neighbors five years from now? Who will want to be a neighbor five years from now?

What are we doing to affect that wanting and is it specifically purposeful or disjoint and random?