Cultural Identity and Heritage

Cultural heritage research examines how communities, nations, and institutions decide what from the past is worth preserving, who gets to make that decision, and what purposes those choices serve in the present. Archaeologists and ethnologists working in this space trace how objects, sites, and practices become vessels for identity — and how that process is always shaped by power, whether colonial legacies, nationalist projects, or the economic pressures of mass tourism. A central tension in the field concerns intangible heritage: the songs, rituals, and oral traditions that resist museum display yet are often the most alive to the people who carry them. Researchers are actively debating how globalization reshapes local cultural memory, and whether international preservation frameworks protect vulnerable traditions or quietly impose outside definitions of what culture should look like.

Works

148,558

Total citations

72,412

Keywords

HeritageIdentityTourismMemoryCulturePolitics