Contested cultural heritage: A selective historiography

Although contested cultural heritage has not always been specified in these words, the concept has been cogently present for at least 25 years in anthropology, archaeology, history, geography, architecture, urbanism, and tourism (to name the most obvious disciplines) and is now a framework driving much applied research in these fields internationally. This is because we live in an increasingly fraught world where religious, ethnic, national, political, and other groups manipulate (appropriate, use, misuse, exclude, erase) markers and manifestations of their own and others' cultural heritage as a means for asserting, defending, or denying critical claims to power, land, legitimacy, and so forth. This introductory essay presents a selective historiography of contested cultural heritage as I perceive its development, illustrated by some of the better known cases of its instantiation and augmented by the contributions to this volume.