From its beginning, the relationship between Europe and America has been marked by profound ambivalence. Europe (especially Britain) was both admired and resented, held up for imitation and cursed. For much of American history Europe was respected for its culture, aristocratic manners, eloquence, and social prestige but feared for its class struggles, authoritarianism, state religions, and fratricidal wars. The Europeans felt Americans were uncouth, excessively individualistic, and violent. Although the upper classes were often anti-American, the working class initially viewed the United States as the land of opportunity, equality, and freedom. The United States became the world's most successful multiracial and multiethnic society, but its roots were European (over 80 percent of Americans derived from European stock). The culture, laws, and institutions also largely came from Europe, especially from Britain. But although Europe greatly influenced the United States until World War II, thereafter the United States has shaped Europe. And although for much of American history, Europe was a Mecca for American artists and literati, after World War II American culture became more self-confident and assertive--a reflection of U.S. military and economic might. No longer would the United States shy away from involvement with Europe; instead the United States determined to stay in Europe, rebuild it, and pressure the Europeans into economic cooperation through a customs union and into the military alliance through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). NATO would protect Europeans from the Soviet Union and from one another. The result is a partial Americanization of Europe and the dominance of American culture, technology, business methods, and science. American power and influence created a good deal of hostility, especially from the British and French, who resented the loss of their leadership. But overall, American and Europeans respected each other, depended on each other, and created, by massive reciprocal relationships, the Atlantic Community, the greatest political economic and cultural association in world history.

From ancient Maya cities in Mexico and Central America to the Taj Mahal in India, cultural heritage sites around the world are being drawn into the wave of privatization that has already swept through such economic sectors as telecommunications, transportation, and utilities. As nation-states decide they can no longer afford to maintain cultural properties—or find it economically advantageous not to do so in the globalizing economy—private actors are stepping in to excavate, conserve, interpret, and represent archaeological and historical sites. But what are the ramifications when a multinational corporation, or even an indigenous village, owns a piece of national patrimony which holds cultural and perhaps sacred meaning for all the country's people, as well as for visitors from the rest of the world? In this ambitious book, Lisa Breglia investigates "heritage" as an arena in which a variety of private and public actors compete for the right to benefit, economically and otherwise, from controlling cultural patrimony. She presents ethnographic case studies of two archaeological sites in the Yucatán Peninsula—Chichén Itzá and Chunchucmil and their surrounding modern communities—to demonstrate how indigenous landholders, foreign archaeologists, and the Mexican state use heritage properties to position themselves as legitimate "heirs" and beneficiaries of Mexican national patrimony. Breglia's research masterfully describes the "monumental ambivalence" that results when local residents, excavation laborers, site managers, and state agencies all enact their claims to cultural patrimony. Her findings make it clear that informal and partial privatizations—which go on quietly and continually—are as real a threat to a nation's heritage as the prospect of fast-food restaurants and shopping centers in the ruins of a sacred site.

Exploring the difficult and contested sites of deindustrialized society on the brink of transformation to either heritage or wasteland, this volume looks at the creative ways that such sites are (re)used and suggests that they are not always merely abject or abandoned. As a result, our understanding of the meanings given to left over spaces is enhanced by an examination of the ways they are used. Ambivalent heritage sites are not always recognized for their potential, although artists and people from different recreational activities, such as industrial sites and parkour, use and experience these places in different ways. The contributors introduce fresh ideas on how to approach these sites and the people invested in them, employing multidisciplinary methodologies from archaeology and heritage studies to ethnography and sociology. Through the use of Northern-European case studies such as a former sanatorium, a prison and the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, the reader gains a new perspective on these sites of contestation, which are cherished despite their problematic status. The conclusion is that due to the rapid societal change we are experiencing in the contemporary world, heritage professionals must start to acknowledge and deal with the difficulties that ambivalent heritage sites pose.

Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage focuses on the importance of memory and heritage for individual and group identity, and for their sense of belonging. It aims to expose the motives and discourses related to the destruction of memory and heritage during times of war, terror, sectarian conflict and through capitalist policies. It is within these affected spheres of cultural heritage where groups and communities ascribe values, develop memories, and shape their collective identity.

The act of remaking one's history into a heritage, a conscientiously crafted narrative placed over the past, is a thriving industry in almost every postcolonial culture. This is surprising, given the tainted role of heritage in so much of colonialism's history. Yet the postcolonial state, like its European predecessor of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, deploys heritage institutions and instruments, museums, courts of law, and universities to empower itself with unity, longevity, exaltation of value, origin, and destiny. Bringing the eye of a philosopher, the pen of an essayist, and the experience of a public intellectual to the study of heritage, Daniel Herwitz reveals the febrile pitch at which heritage is staked. In this absorbing book, he travels to South Africa and unpacks its controversial and robust confrontations with the colonial and apartheid past. He visits India and reads in its modern art the gesture of a newly minted heritage idealizing the precolonial world as the source of Indian modernity. He traverses the United States and finds in its heritage of incessant invention, small town exceptionalism, and settler destiny a key to contemporary American media-driven politics. Showing how destabilizing, ambivalent, and potentially dangerous heritage is as a producer of contemporary social, aesthetic, and political realities, Herwitz captures its perfect embodiment of the struggle to seize culture and society at moments of profound social change.

Museum Representations of Chinese Diasporas is the first book to analyse the recent upsurge in museums on Chinese diasporas in China. Examining heritage-making beyond the nation state, the book provides a much-needed, critical examination of China’s engagement with its diasporic communities. Drawing on fieldwork in more than ten museums, as well as interviews with museum practitioners and archival study, Wang offers a timely analysis of the complex ways in which Chinese diasporas are represented in the museum space of China, the ancestral homeland. Arguing that diasporic heritage is highly ambivalent and introducing a diasporic perspective to the study of cultural heritage, this book opens up a new avenue of inquiry into the study and management of cultural heritage in China and beyond. Most importantly, perhaps, Wang sheds new light on the dynamic between China and Chinese diasporas through the lens of the museum. Museum Representations of Chinese Diasporas takes a transnational perspective that will draw attention to the under-researched connections between heritage, mobility and meaning in a global context. As such, this cross-disciplinary work will be of interest to scholars and students working in the museum and heritage studies fields, as well as those studying Asia, China, migration and diaspora, anthropology, history and culture.

What happens when UNESCO heritage conventions are ratified by a state? How do UNESCO’s global efforts interact with preexisting local, regional and state efforts to conserve or promote culture? What new institutions emerge to address the mandate? The contributors to this volume focus on the work of translation and interpretation that ensues once heritage conventions are ratified and implemented. With seventeen case studies from Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and China, the volume provides comparative evidence for the divergent heritage regimes generated in states that differ in history and political organization. The cases illustrate how UNESCO’s aspiration to honor and celebrate cultural diversity diversifies itself. The very effort to adopt a global heritage regime forces myriad adaptations to particular state and interstate modalities of building and managing heritage.

The reconstruction of society after conflict is complex and multifaceted. This book investigates this theme as it relates to cultural heritage through a number of case studies relating to European wars since 1864. The case studies show in detail how buildings, landscapes, and monuments become important agents in post-conflict reconstruction, as well as how their meanings change and how they become sites of competition over historical narratives and claims. Looking at iconic and lesser-known sites, this book connects broad theoretical discussions of reconstruction and memorialisation to specific physical places, and in the process it traces shifts in their meanings over time. This book identifies common threads and investigates their wider implications. It explores the relationship between cultural heritage and international conflict, paying close attention to the long aftermaths of acts of destruction and reconstruction and making important contributions through the use of new empirical evidence and critical theory.

Based on multi-sited anthropological fieldwork, this book describes how various governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental actors engage with colonial and post-colonial built heritage found in Eritrea, Tanzania, Niger and the Republic of the Congo, showing how this engagement produces problematizations of ‘the modern’, which ultimately indicate a need to rescue modernity from its dominant conception as an all-encompassing, epochal and spatial culture.

This book provides a unique examination of the way Europe’s past is represented on contemporary screens and what this says about contemporary cultural attitudes to history. How do historical dramas come to TV and cinema screens across Europe? How is this shaped by the policies and practices of cultural institutions, from media funding boards to tourist agencies and heritage sites? Who watches these productions and how are they consumed in cinemas, on TV and online?, are just some of the questions this volume seeks to answer. From The Lives of Others to Game of Thrones, historical dramas are a particularly visible part of mainstream European film production, often generating major national debates on the role of the past in contemporary national identity construction.