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Drawing on historical and contemporary ethnographic research, this edited collection addresses tangible and intangible forms of urban heritage, their impact on urban policies, and their consequences for urban life, both at individual and social levels. The chapters look at culturally diverse concepts of heritage in their social and historical context, bringing out the potential conflict that cultural memories and ideological approaches may generate and the related processes of social and political legitimation. The book offers different perspectives on how culturally driven urban policies interlink with power dynamics. It will contribute to understanding how memory practices may reflect changing historical narratives, political and ideological projects, and the (re)definition of social identities. This book is of special interest to scholars and students of anthropology, sociology, urban history, ethnographic research, material culture, social and political sciences, and archaeology.
List of contents
Chapter 1. Introduction Ethnography as Medium for a Transdisciplinary Approach to Heritage.- Chapter 2. Mapping Memory and Legitimating Heritage: The case of Two Italian Parks.- Chapter 3. Heritage as Symbols: City Identity and Political Projects in Brindisi.- Chapter 4. Violating the Urban Heritage, Governance Loses Legitimacy.- Chapter 5. From Centennial Hall to People s Hall and Back: Historic Urban Landscape, Legitimacy and the Making of Heritage in Central Europe s Contested Borderlands.- Chapter 6. Heritagization of a Diasporic Past and the Reclaiming of Identity by Displaced Lithuanian Descendants in Trans-Volga Russia.- Chapter 7. (Re)collecting Memories in the Simultaneous City: Encountering Urban Heritage Through Locative Media.- Chapter 8. The Meaning of Ruins: Intersections of Memory and Forgetting.- Chapter 9. Invisible Synagogues in the Urban Context: Preserving a Lost Heritage in Greek Cities.- Chapter 10. Who says heritage? Old Stakes and New Practices of Patrimonialization of Coal Activities in the Industrial French City of Saint-Etienne.- Chapter 11. From the Memorial of Deir ez-Zor to the Cathedral of Shushi: Cultural Cleansing and Transnationalism.- Chapter 12. Catholicism, Multiculturalism and Imperial Legitimacy. A Unique Model of Being and the Efforts for its Construction through Two Examples: Toledo and New Spain.- Chapter 13. The Organization of Space: Authority and Control in the Construction of Cultural Heritage in Coahuila in the Mid-Eighteenth Century.
About the author
Giuliana B. Prato
is Honorary Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Kent, UK, EASU Academician (European Academy of Sciences of Ukraine), and a co-founder and Secretary-Treasurer of the International Urban Symposium-IUS.
Marcello Mollica
is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Messina, Italy, and Deputy-chair of the IUAES Commission on Urban Anthropology.
Summary
Drawing on historical and contemporary ethnographic research, this edited collection addresses tangible and intangible forms of urban heritage, their impact on urban policies, and their consequences for urban life, both at individual and social levels. The chapters look at culturally diverse concepts of heritage in their social and historical context, bringing out the potential conflict that cultural memories and ideological approaches may generate and the related processes of social and political legitimation. The book offers different perspectives on how culturally driven urban policies interlink with power dynamics. It will contribute to understanding how memory practices may reflect changing historical narratives, political and ideological projects, and the (re)definition of social identities. This book is of special interest to scholars and students of anthropology, sociology, urban history, ethnographic research, material culture, social and political sciences, and archaeology.
