Heritopia: World Heritage and Modernity - Hardcover

by Jes Wienberg (Author)

Heritopia creatively investigates the meaning of the past in the present, using Abu Simbel and other World Heritage sites as points of departure. It paves the way for a new discourse about pastness, heritage and society. In doing so, it overcomes the division between critical heritage inquiry and the world of heritage management.

Back Jacket

Heritopia is an original inquiry into World Heritage and modernity. While its author is an archaeologist, the book ranges widely across a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, social sciences, and the arts.

Using the famous temples of Abu Simbel and other World Heritage sites as a point of departure, the book explores multiple meanings of the past in the present. It employs three perspectives: the truth of knowledge, the beauties of narrative, and ethical demands. Crisis theories are rejected as nostalgic expressions of contemporary social criticism. Modernity is viewed as a collection of contradictory narratives and reinterpreted as an enlightened combination of technological progress and recently evolved ideas. The book resists the notion that heritage is everywhere and that it constitutes a problem. It investigates the World Heritage Convention as an innovation, demonstrating that the definition of a World Heritage site succeeds in creating a tenable category of outstanding and exclusive heritage.

Introducing the term Heritopia in order to conceptualise the utopian expectations associated with World Heritage, the book points to possibilities of using the past creatively when meeting present-day and future challenges.

Author Biography

Jes Wienberg is a Professor in the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History at Lund University