European inventory of
societal values of culture

Gonzalez - From a given to a construct

Gonzalez, P. A. (2014). From a given to a construct: Heritage as a commons. Cultural Studies, 28(3): 359–390.

This article offers a seminal work in considering heritage as commons. Although it focuses on heritage studies, policies, and practices, it has wider implications for the whole field of culture, since it is within this field that common values, livelihoods, and processes of creation can be commodified and reified. The objective of the article was to show that conceiving heritage as a common situated in specific contexts rather than as a universal essence can open up novel epistemological spheres of communication between different knowledge practices. Also, it aimed to bridge some ontological gaps among the various stakeholders in the arena of heritage, such as academics, managers, architects, local communities, and market forces.

Stemming from the author’s ethnographic work in Val de San Lorenzo, Spain, the article suggests that heritage should be conceived as an emergent material and immaterial construction process involving many different agents. Currently, these processes tend towards the privatization of common values. This is detrimental to local communities, as such a process entails a fundamental alienation between objects and subjects and the reification of heritage.  The article suggests that considering heritage as a common could provide a springboard to tackle this problem. The author emphasizes that scholars should not only be bound to a critical discursive stance but should also commit to ‘ontological politics’ that would situate them as mediators between the global hierarchies of value generated by heritage and the common productive potential of local communities.