Heritage and History: Twins Separated at Birth

David Lowenthal knows more about the uses and abuses of the past than anyone I am aware of. His classic The Past is a Foreign Country (1985) touched on every conceivable dimension of contemporary culture’s passion for the past, making connections between domains of collecting, restoration, and preservation that most historians at the time were either unaware of, or, if they did acknowledge other uses of the past, were generally dismissive of. Only someone outside the field could have written such a book, for academic professions have a way of constructing blinkers that prevent those inside the academy from seeing that which is too close for comfort. We have therefore to thank this distinguished cultural geographer, an American who has long been a resident of London, for forcing us to see that historians are not the only ones who stake a claim to the past.

This new book is much less compendious, but a good deal more argumentative. David Lowenthal is alarmed at the degree to which heritage in all its various manifestations has overwhelmed history. While he would locate the origins of that trend sometime in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, he is convinced that the 1980s represented a major turning point, a rapid acceleration toward the fetishization and sacralization of the past. He notes, for example, that 95 percent of all the world’s museums were founded after 1945, and most of these in the last two decades. We have become a salvage society, so fearful of losing touch with the past that we collect, restore, and protect everything that is old, and much that is quite new. The definition of the antique has been allowed to encroach on the present. We are a retro-chic civilization in which even the future has become a collectable. The definition of heritage has expanded beyond the old definitions of inheritance to include virtually everything imaginable, however intangible and unverifiable. Two hundred years ago only the propertied classes had anything to pass on. Today, heritage has been democratized and even those who have no property have something they regard as more precious—roots, traditions, or genes—which they are determined to hold on to at all cost.

With heritage comes a new fatalism. Today we do not act on history, but surrender to it. To the debate between Nature and Nurture has been added the standoff between Heritage and History. In field after field, from race relations to adoption policy, heritage seems to be trumping history. “Growing reliance on innateness and determinism leaves us more and more at the mercy of doomsters, fatalists, and fundamentalists,” Lowenthal warns (p. 226). This is as evident in the recent episodes of ethnic cleansing as it is in debates over family values. Even in big science, like the human genome project, the smart money is now on heritage rather than environment.

Heritage has become a global phenomenon. One of the great strengths of Lowenthal’s book, attributable to his extraordinary reach as a geographer, is its documentation of the degree to which a passion for the past now animates all parts of the world. While this may have been one of the legacies of European imperialism, the concept of heritage is not something that non-Western peoples want to divest themselves of. While Europeans and Americans still monopolize much of that which is defined as “world heritage,” their claims are no longer uncontested. Lowenthal documents several of the heritage wars currently being waged. He traces in delightful detail the curious careers of such objects as the Elgin Marbles and the Benin Bronzes, showing how their meaning changed when they were removed from their original settings and venerated by Western culture, thus taking on new value in their place of origin and ultimately generating demands for repatriation.

The book is filled with fascinating examples of claims and counterclaims made in the name of heritage. The chapter entitled “Being First” demonstrates how...