A new look at old heritage: when what you see is not what you get

Abstract

Heritage is a growing part of our culture and is big business. Heritage is shown, discussed and even repaired on television shows, provides the setting for drama series, runs in parallel with crime detection shows, and is an expanding sector of the world tourism market. For many visitors and consumers, heritage encounters and experiences foster the development of a sense of rootedness, belonging and identity, by appropriating the heritage as their own. For some, heritage engagement is a reaction to perceptions of an increasingly media-constructed, consumption-driven and overly-homogenised global culture, making heritage become the marker for establishing or clinging on to a constructed ontological point of difference.