Culture in Heritage On the Socio-Anthropological Notion of Culture in Current Heritage Discourses

Abstract

The intellectual ‘heritage’ of social anthropology - universalism, cultural relativism and comparative method - is today strongly used as a tool-box by institutions and scholars from other fields. An anthropologically colored concept of culture is employed in UNESCO’s international legal frameworks, in the epistemological foundation and justification of the new academic subject heritage as well as for wider contextualizations of case studies on specific heritage items. While all of these discourses involve a marked universalistic notion of culture, the contribution of our paper is to show the different roles that the anthropological subject, culture, plays in each one of them. (Past; History; Sociology of time; Cultural Heritage; UNESCO)