Is Cultural Sustainability Diminishing the Heritage Enterprise?

Abstract

         There is evidence of a gathering disconnect between practices oriented to the conservation of material heritage and those that would focus on the sustainability of local culture. Especially in present Asian societies, the latter is increasingly threatened by projects in national(istic) development, also by often unquestioning turns to Western models of historical conservation and its marketing, in part in the name of the tourism enterprise. However, the responding movement to champion cultural sustainability, in the face of rampant development and urbanisation, threatens to relegate the heritage enterprise to the sidelines. The paper is built around three reviews, first of the 2014 conference of the Association for Critical Heritage Studies, second of Denis Byrne’s Counterheritage: Critical Perspectives on Heritage Conservation in Asia (Routledge, 2014) and third The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Heritage Research (2014).