Heritage and practices of public formation. Introduction

Reduced to its simplest of terms, heritage refers to the contemporary activities through which the past comes to matter in the present. In this respect, when most of us write or speak about heritage, we are referring to a social framework of institutions and practices that select, conserve and present material and intangible traces of the past. Within such activities, judgments are made as to which particular aspects of the past are worthy of preservation and are of potential significance for social memory. All this is no doubt well understood. Institutions of heritage and the practices they organise are attempts to embody, through landscape, artefact, text and performance, something of the story and spirit of a social entity, whether defined as an all-embracing notion of humankind or delimited as a particular nation, region, religion, or ethno-cultural group.