Heritage and history Rivals and partners in Europe david lowenthal
The topic of heritage as conceived for this volume is challenging in the extreme. We are enjoined to consider a multitude of foci: heritage as a scientific tool, a commercial instrument, a political agency; in contexts of national museums, of antiquities, and of exotica; in its relations to urban and rural conservation and tourism; and the bearing of heritage on national and European-wide political agendas. To be sure, heritage is intimately connected with all these topics. But simply to enumerate them is to underscore the enormity of the task. To deal in depth with all or even most of these themes would require a volume in itself. Moreover, these diverse heritage aims are seldom conjoined; instead they are frequently competitive or at odds with one another. Thus tourism is characteristically inimical to conservation, museumization runs counter to the dynamics of a living legacy, commercialized uses of heritage are antagonistic to spiritual values, the political deployment of heritage corrodes and undermines scholarly authenticity, and national agendas are at loggerheads with pan-European, not to mention global, heritage purposes. Why heritage is in its essence conflictual I make clear in my book The Heritage 1 Crusade and the Spoils of History. For the most part we value what we inherit as uniquely our own, different from and preferable to anyone else’s. Heritage is not any old past, let alone what objective history tells us what was the past; it is the past we glory in or agonize over, the past through whose lens we construct our present identity, the past that defines us to ourselves and presents us to others. Hence every manifestation of heritage, whether material (landscape, buildings, furniture, paintings, dress) or intangible (language, folklore, rituals, skills) excites jealous possessiveness; it is truly ours, we feel, and we nightily resist efforts by others to violate or expropriate it. History texts in every country are reshaped by heritage needs and demands. Just as the purpose of school history in post-1870 France was famously held to turn peasants into Frenchman, so a Tokyo University historian defends a ‘twisted’ version of Japan’s Second World War record as a sovereign entitlement: ‘All nations have a right to interpret their history in their own way, and pass 2 down that interpretation.’ No aspect of nature or culture is too unimportant or ethereal to quarrel over. Even so transitory, elusive, and immovable a feature as the aurora borealis (or ‘Northern