Cultural heritage encompasses an entire set of objects, places and even beliefs that represent the history and identity of a culture. It can include tangible heritage (something you can see or touch, like artwork or monuments) as well as intangible heritage, such as languages and traditions that cannot be seen or touched but are a part of the culture. It is a way to honor the past and to help people understand where they came from, so they can feel like they belong in their community and their world.
A variety of factors can affect cultural heritage, including financial issues (such as when a piece of heritage needs to be repaired or restored); environmental factors (such as climate change); and human factors (such as conflict or terrorism, which can result in the destruction of cultural heritage). Cultural heritage can also be difficult to maintain because there is often a lack of funding and/or support for maintenance and preservation efforts.
The preservation and protection of cultural heritage are critical issues that must be addressed on a global scale to ensure its survival. Despite the challenges, there are many opportunities to promote the protection and preservation of cultural heritage, and there is growing interest in this field from a wide range of sectors.
The cultural heritage field is broad and involves a wide range of academic disciplines, including archaeology, history, art history, museum studies, anthropology, material culture, and informatics. These disciplines share a common methodology that includes research into the documentation, description and dissemination of cultural heritage.
In the context of this field, heritage is defined as “those works of man or the combined work of nature and man which have an outstanding universal value from the historical, aesthetic, ethnological or other point of view”. This definition was developed in 1972 by UNESCO. It is used by the cultural heritage sector to define what needs to be protected.
Cultural heritage preservation has a number of important issues associated with it, which are best understood as part of a larger theoretical framework. These include contested history and conflicting narratives, cultural imperialism, memory and identity, the repatriation of cultural property to its originary communities, censorship and heritage ethics, multiculturalism, the cultures of practice in museums and other cultural institutions, and the role of communication media in the representation of cultural heritage.
A key challenge in protecting cultural heritage is the fact that it can be difficult to determine its value. This is a complex process, and one that is made more complicated by the fact that those who are custodians of cultural heritage are not experts in organizing or managing funds. The solution to this problem is a system of cooperation between the cultural heritage custodians and those who are experts in organizing and managing money.
This type of cooperation can be facilitated through the use of stated preference methods, which are tools for estimating the economic value of cultural heritage and other assets in order to make informed management decisions. Using these methods can improve the effectiveness of funding and investment in cultural heritage, helping to increase its visibility and support for its protection and preservation.