Heritage under Law: Reexamining Heritage as an Object for Control

Once while presenting a model of heritage denying the application of notions of property and ownership (Carman 2005), it was asked how such a model would be put into legislation. The fact that the question could be asked—when the argument presented specifically challenged the idea of heritage as being ‘governed by legislation’ (Cleere 1989, 10)—emphasises the extent to which heritage is considered and treated as a child of law: we take it so much for granted that any attempt to offer approaches and understandings of heritage that bypass regulation are reinterpreted as a kind of ‘regulation in waiting’. In terms of practice, such an understanding is reflected in the fact that every nation state has some law defining and regulating its cultural heritage (Carman 2015). This chapter considers the implications for heritage as an object of legal control and management. The chapter will draw upon ideas concerning the role and purpose of law as a political tool and how this serves to establish ‘heritage’ as a specific cultural category of object, to be distinguished from other things in the world. This of course has implications for the field of Heritage Studies itself: without such a separation from other objects, students of heritage would have no target for their enquiries. The issue then raised concerns the nature of heritage itself and its reality as an object of investigation.