The field of cultural heritage is no longer solely dependent on the expertise of art and architectural historians, archaeologists, conservators, curators, and site and museum administrators. It has dramatically expanded across disciplinary boundaries and social contexts and now includes vernacular architecture, intangible cultural practices, knowledge, and language, performances, and rituals, as well as cultural landscapes. Heritage has become entangled with the broader social, political, and economic contexts in which heritage is created, managed, transmitted, protected, or destroyed. Heritage protection now encompasses a growing set of methodological approaches whose objectives are not necessarily focused upon the maintenance of material fabric, traditionally cultural heritage’s primary concern. Rather, these objectives have become explicitly social with methods foregrounding public engagement, diverse values, and community-based action. Thus, we introduce the term “public heritage” as a way of bringing together these emerging practices. This handbook charts major sites of convergence between the humanities and the social sciences—where new disciplinary perspectives are being brought to bear on public heritage. This introduction outlines the potential contributions of development studies, political science, anthropology, management studies, human geography, ecology, psychology, sociology, cognitive studies, and education to the field of public heritage.
Rural communities in the United States have faced mounting pressure to develop their local economies in ways that threaten their historic agrarian landscapes and cultural practices. However, these communities are often wary of, if not hostile to, top–down approaches to historic preservation and landscape conservation. Community‐engaged heritage protection strategies shift the focus from managing cultural and natural heritage as discrete resources to envisioning heritage and its protection as a form of community development. This paper presents a case study from rural New England in which the intergenerational sharing of narratives about heritage landscapes moves beyond simply commemorating the past, to contributing to the present and future welfare of community members. In this case, heritage narratives shed light on residents’ changed relationships toward their land and each other, while also revitalizing a sense of a collective past and, more importantly, a shared future.
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