Desirable future(s) of heritage narratives

Purpose This article takes a comparative and by neutral standpoint (as far as possible), taking into account four overlapping bodies of contemporary museums/heritage scholarship that together reframe what museums and heritage sites are for: the critical-narrative literature on heritage as identity-making; the human-rights and Faro-Convention literature that recasts heritage as a participatory entitlement; the eco-museum and sociomuseological tradition that treats communities as the primary narrators of their own heritage and the heritage-futures ideas/literature that argues heritage is principally about assembling, regenerating and even partnering with decay rather than freezing the past. Design/methodology/approach This article takes a comparative and by far deliberately neutral standpoint. The article does not adjudicate between before mentioned bodies of work. It asks instead what shared direction of travel they trace, and what a desirable future of museum and heritage narratives might therefore look like – without proposing a single doctrine. Findings The desirable future of heritage narratives, as drawn by the four bodies (critical-heritage studies, Faro Convention, sociomuseology, heritage futures) of scholarship considered here, is best understood as a horizon rather than a doctrine. It is a horizon in which museums and heritage are read as future-conditional rather than past-tense devices. Set side by side, the four bodies of work above do not collapse into a single doctrine, their philosophical commitments are different. They however converge on at least three movements, from object-fixation toward relations-and-processes, from authorised expertise toward dialogical authorship and from past-conservation toward future-assembly that includes non-human life. Practical implications Presented theories could be implicated in everyday practical work. Social implications The study helped in different understanding of heritage, as well as the social role of heritage. Originality/value The article is providing an overview of the ideas in the field of heritage, the paper is useful to the readers who are interested to further develop heritage theories (with possible implementation in practices) and projections into future.