International Journal of Heritage Studies

ISSN: 1352-7258 (Print) 1470-3610 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjhs20

Critical heritage studies and the legacies of the

late-twentieth century heritage canon

Kynan Gentry & Laurajane Smith

To cite this article: Kynan Gentry & Laurajane Smith (2019): Critical heritage studies and the
legacies of the late-twentieth century heritage canon, International Journal of Heritage Studies,
DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2019.1570964

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2019.1570964

Published online: 02 Feb 2019.

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2019.1570964

Critical heritage studies and the legacies of the late-twentieth

century heritage canon
Kynan Gentrya and Laurajane Smith b

a
School of Social Sciences, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia; bCentre for Heritage and Museum
Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

In recent years an interest in ‘critical heritage studies’ (CHS) has grown Received 8 August 2018
significantly – its differentiation from ‘heritage studies’ rests on its Accepted 12 January 2019
emphasis of cultural heritage as a political, cultural, and social phenom- KEYWORDS
enon. But how original or radical are the concepts and aims of CHS, and Lowenthal; heritage studies;
why has it apparently become useful or meaningful to talk about critical critical heritage theory;
heritage studies as opposed to simply ‘heritage studies’? Focusing on the historiography; memory
canon of the 1980s and 1990s heritage scholarship – and in particular the
work of the ‘father of heritage studies’, David Lowenthal – this article
offers a historiographical analysis of traditional understandings and
approaches to heritage, and the various explanations behind the post-
WWII rise of heritage in western culture. By placing this analysing within
the wider frames of post-war historical studies and the growth of scho-
larly interest in memory, the article seeks to highlight the limitations and
bias of the much of the traditional heritage canon, and in turn frame the
rationale for the critical turn in heritage studies.

Introduction
In late 2015 a new edition of David Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country was published1.
And why not – the work, after all, is the most heavily cited book on heritage ever published, and is
held by four times as many libraries globally than the next most popular work.2 Frequently
described as ‘seminal’ or ‘canonical’, it was developed out of the 1981 collection Our Past Before
Us: Why do we Save it?, which had been edited by Lowenthal and the architectural editor of
Country Life, Marcus Binney, and which had in turn emerged out of a 1979 symposium on
historic preservation convened under the auspices of the National Council for Monuments
(NCM). ‘One of the major social phenomena of our time’, as the symposium’s flyer noted, this
was one of a number of major conferences in the late-70s and early-80s exploring the recent
growth of interest in historic landscapes (Lowenthal and Binney 1981, 9). Lowenthal was central
to many of these, being a keynote speaker of the Institute of British Geographers’ 1978 ‘Valued
Environments’ symposium, and the aforementioned NCM symposium, as well as being one of the
organisers of the Conservation and Development of the Country Parklands Heritage symposium
run by the Oxford Landscape Heritage Group in September 1979. Not surprisingly, Lowenthal has
thus been described as one of the ‘founding fathers’ of heritage studies (Olwig 2003, 875).
Yet now more than three decades old, how relevant is this – not to mention the wider 1980s
heritage ‘canon’ – particularly in light of the rapid growth in recent years of ‘critical heritage
studies’ (hereafter CHS)?3 This is the central concern of the present article. Starting with an

CONTACT Kynan Gentry ky.gentry@uwa.edu.au

© 2019 Kynan Gentry and Laurajane Smith. Published with license by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 K. GENTRY AND L. SMITH

overview of the rationale CHS scholars have given for the recent critical turn in heritage studies,
the first half of the article then seeks to weight these claims through a theoretical and historio-
graphical exploration of the consolidation of heritage studies as a field of scholarly consideration
in the 1980s and 1990s. Establishing, among other things, the emergence of a literary heritage
‘canon’ during this period, the article then focuses on the work of David Lowenthal – widely
recognised as having both a formative influence on the field, and constituting its most heavily
cited scholar – to critique the CHS claim of the limitations of late-twentieth-century heritage
scholarship.

Critical heritage studies: a genealogy

First coined around the turn of the millennium, CHS has gained traction to describe a growing
body of scholarship that seeks to move beyond the traditional focus of heritage studies on
technical issues of management and practice, to one emphasising cultural heritage as a political,
cultural, and social phenomenon.4 This claim, however, is by no means new, with clear precursors
reaching back to the 1950s, not to mention being central to the development of heritage studies as
a recognisable field in the 1980 and 1990s.
Why then, have advocates recently felt it necessary to remind heritage scholars that heritage is
primarily a cultural phenomenon, and not something simply subject to technical and policy
debate? An answer to this last question is complex, but is ultimately rooted in the suggestion
that earlier scholarship has been dominated by narrow perceptions and approaches to heritage
that stress the inherent value, meaning and materiality of heritage; and that the interests of both
heritage, and future generations are best served by the neutrality and objectivity of heritage
professionals. Advocates of CHS, by comparison, contend that the discourses that frame our
understanding of heritage are a performance in which the meaning of the past is continuously
negotiated in the context of the needs of the present. This process is then used in a wide range of
ways to stabilise or destabilise issues of identity, memory and sense of place – all of which have
consequence for individual and collective well-being, equity and social justice. Heritage is, in other
words, a ‘discursive construction’ with material consequences (Smith 2006, 11–13). Conducted
within the confines of the authorised heritage discourse (AHD), official forms of heritage tend to
reproduce established social hierarchies, although these may be challenged by alternative expres-
sions of heritage and identity by sub-national interests. The recent drawing of heritage into
neoliberal governmentality has only complicated such challenges, with both states and corpora-
tions now commonly seeking to co-opt heritage to political and economic ends (Coombe and
Baird 2015). Such observations, however, are often obscured (if not actively forgotten) owing to
the way heritage studies is constructed as a field of enquiry, in so far as the intellectual frameworks
which construct and define the field owe far too much to a belief in the legitimacy of the cultural
work that heritage does. Heritage studies as a field of study is thus itself party to the cultural and
political work that heritage does.
To explore why this might be so, we need to consider the dominance of western – and within
this Anglophone – origins of heritage studies as a field of enquiry. This is not to suggest
Anglophone origins of heritage preservation and conservation, and indeed, a number of impor-
tant accounts have in recent years emerged highlighting the parallel rise of the preservation ethos
across Europe and the Mediterranean in the nineteenth century (Hamilakis 2007; Lozny 2011;
Swenson 2013). The post-1945 heritage boom is equally broad – the core narrative being that it
was a response to the scale of heritage destruction and loss that occurred as a result of the Second
World War and post-war urban renewal, coupled with the growing pace of change and demise of
traditional notions of certainty associated with the rise of post-industrial modernity (Harvey
1990). Philosophically, the argument goes, at the heart of this was the decline of religious
authority, coupled with the post-Enlightenment establishment of meta-narratives of progress
and rationality, in which change and the forward march of history had increasingly given rise
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 3

to a sense of rupture, displacement, and wider crises in notions of identity, place and ‘past’. The
net result was an over-investment in the perceived ‘redemptive’ aspect of heritage (Butler
2006, 466).
Such is the dominance of this narrative that within the broader corpus of work on material
culture a general consensus has formed around the argument that conservation – both in theory
and practice – emerged in the West, and more specifically Western Europe (Winter 2014). Others
have gone even further, suggesting that heritage is ‘both a product and producer of Western
modernity’ (Harrison 2013, 39; see also Byrne 1991; Walsh 1992). As a corollary of this, the rise of
scholarly interest in heritage from the mid-1970s is said to be equally Eurocentric, manifesting in
scholarly efforts across history, archaeology, sociology, geography, politics and tourism to account
for this shift. The same can be seen in the literature on heritage practice, which has been
dominated by work in English, French, Italian, Spanish, and other European languages.
As a number of scholars have recently argued, however, this culturally circumscribed notion of
heritage was then further reinforced by the dominance of Europe and the US as global centres of
academia, and by the hegemony of the English language to knowledge dissemination (Alatas 2006;
Connell 2007; Winter 2014). Further to this, Harrison (2013, 63) suggests that the work of
international NGOs – and in particular the UNESCO World Heritage Committee – has, since
the 1970s, promulgated a particular set of values regarding heritage, with the text of the 1972
World Heritage Convention ‘strongly reflect[ing] the professional interests of ancient historians,
architects and archaeologists, respectively, and [makes] an assumption that heritage is a special
class of object that is defined and studied by “experts”’ (see also Smith 2006; Waterton 2010). For
this reason, and for reasons of simple logistics, this article is primarily concerned with the
Anglophone literature. A simple illustration of the hegemonic nature of English literature here
can be seen in Pierre Nora’s enormously influential Between Memory and History: Les lieux de
memoire (1989), which while a direct English translation of his earlier Entre mémoire et histoire
(1984), has more than five-times the citations of the earlier French version of the work.5
There are also domestic variables that need to be considered here, with the relative uniqueness
of the British experience resulting in a different dynamic in heritage engagement. While in France,
Germany, and Greece, for example, a relatively centralised and state-based approached to pre-
servation had been dominant since the nineteenth century (Nora 1989; Hamilakis 2007; Swendon
2013), in Britain state efforts to assert their influence over heritage preservation really begins with
the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and 1953 Historic Buildings and Ancient Monuments
Act, while earlier efforts had been predominantly public and popular in orientation (Cowell 2008).
State intervention was in turn a key driver behind the Left’s embracing of heritage, localism, and
‘peoples history’ in Britain from the early-1950s, giving rise to early theoretical and political
considerations of the social and cultural role of heritage in the ideas of Richard Hoggart,
Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and (a little later) Barbara Bender (Gentry 2013, 192, 193).
These factors also very much shaped the nature of British scholarly engagement with
heritage, such that while much of the scholarship of the 1980s considered the political dimen-
sion of heritage, in practice, outside of the museum this had little impact on heritage practice
and policy. In part, this was a result of the circumscribed political perspectives of the historical
and geographical disciplines that dominated 1980s heritage scholarship, and equally on the
practitioner’s response to the explosive growth of the sector on the technical ‘doing’ of heritage,
but there was also more to it. The 1990s scholarship was more nuanced and wide-ranging in its
engagement with the political and theoretical, however, as Appendix 1 illustrates, by the mid-
2000s a clear pattern had emerged in which a cluster of texts were being cited more heavily than
others. If we look at Appendices 2 and 3, however – these exploring the degree of cross-
referencing between texts – we see that of these six texts, three stand out as having a much
higher incidence of being cited in a single work – these being Lowenthal (1985), Hewison
(1987), and Wright (1985). While Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s Destination Culture (1998), for exam-
ple, has roughly one-and-a-half times the total number of citations of Wright’s On Living in an
4 K. GENTRY AND L. SMITH

Old Country, it is three times less likely than Wright to be cited alongside Lowenthal and
Hewison. The more focused scope and anthropological bent of Destination Culture is likely to
be an explanatory factor here, and indeed, its high number and steep growth of citations suggest
the work is simply being employed in different frames to the more socio-political British works
of the 1980s.
Indeed, this dualism – which was very much read in class-based terms – was uniquely
dominant in British heritage scholarly during the 1980s and 1990s, with key themes of this
literature being what at the time was seen as the growing ‘Disneyfication’ of the past resulting
from the uncontrolled economic exploitation, and the increasing development of community-
specific museums, eco-museums and heritage centres that challenged the traditional nationalising
and citizen-making focus of larger museums. This diversification of the museum was often
characterised simply as offering economic panaceas to de-industrialised and other economically
and politically marginalised communities, with this in turn giving rise to growing academic
attention to the increasing use of heritage and patrimony in underpinning Conservative social
and cultural policies. This, for example, would be the key theme behind the 1977 Past and Present
conference on ‘The Invention of Tradition’, with the issue spilling into the public arena following
Margaret Thatcher’s annexation of ‘Victorian values’ in the run-up to the 1983 General Election,
during which she sought to capitalise on the cultural value of Victorian ‘tradition’ by asserting
a direct lineage between the values of the Victorian era and her own political position, and to
invoke the era as ‘a talisman for lost stabilities’ (Samuel 1992, 9).
It was also this particular socio-political frame that dominated the perspectives taken by Robert
Hewison, Raphael Samuel, and Patrick Wright, with Hewison’s The Heritage Industry (1987), for
example, giving name to a particular critique that saw heritage as a right-wing trend that had
managed to dupe a gullible public. As a polemic6 on the impoverishment of the sanitised nostalgic
view of the past that supposedly lay at the heart of populist heritage, however, Hewison’s
argument that it stultified contemporary political and social debate and imagination was far
from new. Similar criticisms had existed since the mid-1950s as part of the growth of popular
engagement with landscape then driven by expanding motorcar ownership and the development
of the British motorway network.7
Samuel’s position was almost the polar opposite – the modern rise of heritage was evidence of
the democratisation of engagement with the past. It was ‘of the people’ rather than ‘for the
people’, and thus something to be celebrated (Samuel 1994). More than simply being a case of ‘the
past’ being reclaimed from the esoterism of academic History, however, Samuel saw heritage as
a conduit for social and political engagement – a view most evident in the nature of his
involvement in debates around the form that the British history curriculum should take that
followed the passing of the 1988 Education Reform Act, where he pushed for a pluralistic syllabus
that drew on both conservative and radical notions of the past.
Wright’s On Living in an Old Country (1985) sat in between these two works, and was
important for a number of reasons. Firstly, while Hewison and Samuel could at times quite
rightly be charged with oversimplification bordering on the polemic, Wright’s work was more
nuanced, and sought to critically examine the formation of modern British historical conscious-
ness as a social phenomenon. Drawing heavily on the philosopher Agnes Heller’s idea of ‘everyday
historical consciousness’, Wright’s argument was that the rise of heritage in contemporary Britain
was not simply a product of ruling-class ideological domination, but rather the result of the
transformations and dislocations of the forces of modernity, which for recent generations had
been at the heart of political and economic decline in Britain. The implication of this was that in
times of heightened social anxiety, conservatives were well placed to effect ‘the political conscrip-
tion of the past’, and hoodwink a public which has difficulty ‘in conceiving a future at all’ (25,
170). More recently this argument has extended the global frames of heritage recognition and
protection, with heritage increasingly being understood as an arena for the playing out of conflicts
and ideologies of the present, and the processes of ‘heritagisation’ increasingly drawn into regional
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 5

development and transnational political and economic systems. A number of scholars, for
example, have noted how the selection processes of UNESCO’s World Heritage List have
increasingly been driven by countries’ political influence and national strategic interests, while
in other parts of the world cultural claims are used to legitimise rights for Indigenous and other
underprivileged groups (Steiner and Frey 2012; Bertacchini et al. 2016). Similar criticisms have
been extended to Intangible Cultural Heritage (Lixinski 2011; Aykan 2015).
Lastly, brief comment needs to be made on the centrality of the museum to the emergence of
Anglophone heritage studies – in part because even today there remains a tendency for scholars to
consider museum and heritage studies as being connected, but discreet. While both are under-
stood to draw from social history and cultural studies, museum studies is traditionally seen to lean
more on art history, literary theory, and post-structuralism in the same way that heritage studies
looks to archaeology, architecture and geography. Indeed, scholarly considerations of the emer-
gence of Anglophone heritage studies typically mirror the profile discussed earlier – Hewison and
Wright are discussed, as increasingly is Samuel; perhaps Nora, and unfailingly, Lowenthal. The
museum gets far less attention, despite it being central to the narratives and critiques presented by
Lowenthal, Samuel, Wright, and Hewison. This was especially the case for Hewison, who took the
rapid growth of ‘popular museums’ and ‘heritage centres’ as both the trigger for writing The
Heritage Industry, and the focus of his critique. Indeed, it was primarily the ‘independent
museum’ that Hewison had in his sights – these, the charge went, belonging to the nebulous
zone of heritage, and offering little more than packaged and marketed nostalgia – ‘bogus history’.
Traditional public museums, by comparison, upheld worthy civic values, and were exponents of
authoritative historical knowledge, and definitive cultural meaning (1987, 84, 85, 143, 144).
Dominant as such texts were – and have remained – to the heritage studies genealogy, by the
early-1990s a number of more considered analyses of the museum and its place in the wider rise
of heritage had emerged, however, as Appendices 1 and 2 again illustrate, these works were
relatively neglected by heritage scholars, despite a number of these works engaging directly with
heritage scholarship.8 Indeed, recognition of this neglect was a contributing factor behind the
establishment of the International Journal of Heritage Studies in 1994 by the geographer Peter
Howard, who in addition to wanting to encourage an inter-disciplinary perspective in heritage
scholarship, maintained that there was considerable common ground between heritage and
museum studies, and that certain topics actually cut across disciplines (1994, 3, 2013).
What we’re suggesting then is that the 1980s Anglophone ‘heritage canon’ was ground-
breaking as an early critique of heritage, and went a long way in problematising and politicising
the assumed neutrality of culture and heritage that had dominated the 1970s, yet their dominant
representations of heritage as false, anaemic, and ultimately bound up with the maintenance of
capitalism, was heavily circumscribed. The charge, for example, that the rise of the independent
museum was evidence of the creative death of Britain bore little connection to the economic and
political realities that underwrote its rise – namely spiralling unemployment and the death of
traditional industry that had themselves resulted from Thatcher’s embracing of deflationary
economic policies, trade liberalisation, and the push to diversify the economic base of the country.
In order to both restart the economy, and in support of the ‘enterprise culture’, a number of
incentive schemes were introduced, and it was on the back of this that the independent museum
flourished. It was, contrary to Hewison and Wright’s lament, an illustration of local initiative and
effort to make the most of a bad situation.9 Indeed, when we understand Thatcherism as but part
of the wider social, political and economic change that came in the late-1970s and early-1980s –
one that also included the influence of Reagan and Federal Reserve chair, Paul Volcker, in the US;
the first cautious steps to towards the liberalisation of the Chinese economy; and the ‘age of
uncertainty’ in France – it is easier to appreciate the complex nature of engagement with heritage
that emerged at this time.
The other key contribution from the museum was theory. Rooted in part in the wider rise of
heritage – but equally in the demand for public museums to do ‘more with less’ and justify their
6 K. GENTRY AND L. SMITH

funding from the public purse – in the second half of the 1980s scholarly explorations such as
Robert Lumley’s The Museum Time-Machine (1988) and Peter Vergo’s The New Museology (1989)
began to critically explore the purpose, politics, and values of museums and heritage institutions.
Intellectually this ‘new museology’ was rooted in developments of the period such as social history
and cultural studies, with their emphasis on alternative claims about the past, and equally in the
post-modern critique of power, knowledge, and authority. The resurgence of interest in ‘memory’
was also a part of this, with its growth rooted in the challenges posed by post-structuralism and
the ideas of theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault
around knowledge and power, and in Hayden White and Peter Novick’s influential critiques of
truth and objectivity in historical work. Decolonisation was also in there – memory, after all,
being a mode of discourse natural to people ‘without history’.
Pierre Nora, meanwhile, argued that the modern preoccupation with the past was rooted in the
death of real memory, and that modern memory had taken on a meaning so broad and all-
inclusive that it had come to be used as a substitute for ‘history’ (Nora 2002). While focusing on
the French experience, Nora placed this transformation at the intersection of three phenomena –
the faltering of belief in the promise of industrial modernity; the collapse of the ideological
construction of French official history following de Gaulle’s death in 1970; and the collapse of
the French Communist Party’s influence on political life. The ‘age of commemoration’ that arose
out of this was, Nora argued, was thus a response to the rupturing of a sense of historical
continuity: no longer able to connect the past with the future, French society felt an obligation
to indiscriminately stockpile everything that might eventually be of value to its descendants.
Nora’s was one of a number of influential scholarly explorations to emerge during the late-
1970s and early-1980s into the whence of tradition (and by extension heritage) as being a response
to either wider shifts in societal perceptions of rationality and the rejection of dogma, or as being
tied up with political transformation. Driving this was the post-war rise in Europe and the US of
cultural and social anthropology, and the post-structural turn in sociology, with the influence of
this through the 1960s and 1970s becoming increasingly evident on historical scholarship through
the rise of the Annales school in France; the Bielefeld School in West Germany; and the
emergence of the ‘new social history’ in Britain and the United States.10 While these disciplinary
and national perspectives varied in periodisation and driving force, all agreed that the role and
place of ‘the past’ had changed. This, however, was not the first time such an argument had been
posed, with the German philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers – then seeking to diagnose
societal ill of the late Weimar Republics – argued in his Spiritual Condition of the Age in 1931 that
in modern society human life was endangered and alienated by industrial modernity, in which
a person no longer had a definite place or status in the whole, with this leading to a sense of an
uprooted existence with no continuity. Jaspers also accused modern education (with its focus on
‘facts’ and technical skills) of dismissing historical tradition, with the regeneration of this lost
relationship requiring some sort of turn to the past beyond mere knowledge.
This apparent distinction between history and heritage would be central to heritage scholarship
of the 1980s, with both Hewison and Lowenthal embracing the position that heritage was an
anaemic relative of History. As Lowenthal, for example, argued in The Past is a Foreign Country,
not only was heritage separate from history and part of a ‘cult of nostalgia’, but it was a social and
psychological event. In consideration of the ‘virtue of heritage’, he responded ‘a fixed past is not
what we really need, or at any rate not all we need. We require a heritage with which we
continually interact, one which fuses past with present. This heritage is not only necessary but
inescapable; we cannot now avoid feeling that the past is to some extent our own creation’ (1985,
410). Nora went even further, arguing that history and memory were fundamentally hostile to one
another, with memory existing as an unselfconscious, dynamic form that existed to serve the
present, while history was intellectual, critical and universal.
The embracing of this distinction by early scholarship was probably tied up with efforts to
consolidate heritage studies as a field of study, but it also tended to result in oversimplification,
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 7

with heritage scholars rarely engaging with what was becoming a complex critique and theoretical
engagement with the history-memory-heritage question. Indeed, heritage scholarship from this
point tended to follow two dominant and somewhat narrow concerns. The first was the pre-
dominance of technical and case study work – a thread that was particularly dominant in
architecture, archaeology and art history, and which believed it could ignore or control the
political use of heritage through the provision of trained and so-called objective and professional
experts who were well versed in the technical application of national and international legal and
policy instruments. The tendency here was to blur systemic or wider political and cultural issues
as they were analysed on a case-by-case basis, so that theoretical debate became hindered due to
the nature of casework methodologies, coupled with an avid reluctance to consider a synthetic
analysis of the consequence of preservation practices beyond its impact on architectural or
archaeological fabric.
The second position, and one central to the ideas of Lowenthal, Nora, and others discussed
above, was grounded in the elitist idea of heritage as an oppositional or popular form of history
that must be regarded with suspicion and brought under the control of such professionals as
historians, archaeologists and museums curators. A more positive reading of this position might
emphasise both a politicised awareness of heritage (i.e. Hewison), and a concern to explore
heritage as a social and cultural phenomenon (i.e. Lowenthal and Nora), however, be that as it
may, this body of work was marked by a lack of methodological and theoretical rigour, and
a noticeable lack of engagement with the wider debate around heritage and memory as
contested notions.11
The 1990s saw a number of notable exceptions to this, with critical explorations of heritage
undertaken by scholars such as John Tunbridge, Gregory Ashworth, Bella Dicks, Denis Byrne, and
Sharon Macdonald among others, however, as Appendix 4 illustrates, such work was dwarfed –
both in number and growth-rate of citations – by the 1980s canon and from geographical,
historical, and archaeological perspectives on heritage, despite the former being more theoretically
rigorous.12 While, for example, Nora, Hewison, and Lowenthal’s distinction between history and
heritage were widely embraced by scholars in History and heritage studies, scholars in memory
studies and anthropology were far more critical of this argument. The contention that the modern
nature and role of memory was fundamentally different from that in the past was especially
contentious in the eye of scholars such as Samuel (1994) and Andreas Huyssen (1995), while the
anthropologist Gillian Feeley-Harnik went further, shelving the theory of a tearing of memory in
modernity altogether and issuing a rallying cry to counter the essential argument: ‘The past is not
a foreign country or a distant country; it is the very ground on which, with which we stand, move
and otherwise interact’ (Feeley-Harnik 1996, 216). Drawing on the sociologist J. D. Pell’s sugges-
tion that ‘conceptions of the past are facts of the present’, her essential argument was that as we
have no access to the past that is not through the present, cultural connections flow from the
present to the past, not from the past to the present (1984, 112). Tim Ingold’s notion of
‘mutualism’ further added to this – mutualism holding that ‘the structures and meanings that
we find in the world are already there in the information that we extract in the act of perception;
their source lies in the objects we perceive, they are not added on by the perceiver’ (Ingold 1992,
46). The significance assigned to an object, place, or event is unique to the perceiver, and but one
of a theoretically infinite number of ‘authentic’ heritage expressions. Seeking to transcend the
epistemological bias of the traditional ‘historical’ approach to heritage, Feeley-Harnik called for
a ‘memorial approach’, which would provide a means of going beyond the ‘past-present’ dichoto-
mies to engage with alternative and ‘non-Western’ expressions of cultural transmission and
memory work (Feeley-Harnik 1996).
Within the canon, Samuel’s approach to heritage arguably came closer to this than most. His
position was wide ranging. He agreed with Lowenthal that heritage had become ‘one of the
major. . .social movements of our time’, but also noted that Conservative uses of heritage were
only half of the story – the Left was equally guilty of this charge (Samuel 1994, 25). Moreover, he
8 K. GENTRY AND L. SMITH

rejected the timbre of the calls by Hewison et al. for a politicised understanding of heritage – not
because he saw heritage as apolitical, but because he saw Hewison’s argument that we needed to
turn to neutral expertise to defuse the right-wing use of heritage as playing into the hegemonic
discourse. Arguing instead for a less elitist understanding of the politics of heritage, Samuel saw
the alternative characterisations of heritage created ‘by the people’ as illustrative of heritage as
a democratic force which offered points of access to ‘ordinary people’ and constructed ‘a wider
form of belonging’ (259).

From ‘the past is a foreign country’ to ‘the essence of social justice’

Looking at the bigger picture, all of this presents an interesting, albeit slightly concerning image.
Firstly, while the turn from ‘heritage studies’ to CHS is hugely important within the field, a core
element of this has also been about heritage studies playing catch-up, rather than ‘leading the
way’. Thankfully, however, this turn has also begun to see heritage scholarship cross-pollinate
other spheres of research in a way that earlier heritage scholarship did not, with the ‘memorial
approach’ of CHS proving an effective starting point to chart out alternative expressions of
heritage. Indeed, as Beverley Butler notes, at the heart of this development has been a shift
from a discussion of the ‘past as a foreign country’ to one
of heritage as a powerful resource for ‘creating a future’ and to the recognition of how a fundamental
reconceptualization of heritage is uniquely placed not only to address claims about identity, ancestry and
cultural transmission but to engage with key moral-ethical issues to our times. (2006, 463)

Second, and more importantly, this presents the traditional canon of heritage scholarship in a far
less flattering light, raising some difficult questions of the epistemological bubbles in which much
of this work has been considered, and simply illustrating the relative value of many traditional
positions on the nature and meaning of heritage. How, for example, considering its significant
theoretical limitations and relative lack of critical engagement with the wider literature on
‘memory work’ emerging at the time, do we rationalise the very makeup of this canon? With
this in mind, from here we want to focus on Lowenthal’s work – in part owing to the simple
dominance of his scholarship within the canon, and in part because his perspective on heritage is
reflective of some of the core challenges facing scholars of CHS today.
Lowenthal trained in both history and geography, and retired in 1985 after a career in which he
significantly influenced the development of historical and landscape geography (Olwig 2003). His
interest in heritage, as he notes in The Past is a Foreign Country, was linked to his concerns with
environmental protection and his work on the nineteenth-century conservation geographer
George Perkins Marsh. Lowenthal’s formative work in this area was undertaken between the
mid-1960s and early-1970s, which was a period of profound scholarly interest in landscape yet
one in which the wider frame of environmental psychology came to dominate.13 This was also
a formative period in ‘humanistic geography’, with Lowenthal’s interest in this stemming from the
influence of his mentor John Kirtland Wright. Centrally concerned with how social, cultural,
personal, and circumstantial variables influenced environmental choice and behaviour – and
notably the malleable mechanisms of long-term memory and ‘imagined’ landscapes – as
Lowenthal summed it up, his concern was ‘to map the intellectual terrain that could then perhaps
reveal how people made sense of the world around them’ (1987, 338, 1976, 1977, 1978; Lowenthal
and Prince 1976). Here Lowenthal was part of the group of humanists exploring such issues, with
key scholars including the philosopher Eugene Gendlin; the urban planner Kevin Lynch; and the
geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Lowenthal’s contribution to this emergent field was to its historical
dimension, where he explored how perceptions of past events and times impacted perceptions
of the landscapes associated with them, and to the role of ‘time’ in the creation of ‘place’. These
ideas would later be developed by Tuan in his distinction between ‘public symbols’ and the
public’s ‘field of care’ – fields of care being places whose features matter only to those intimately
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 9

associated with them (Tuan 1974). According to Lowenthal, one of the reasons for this additional
focus on the historical was the ‘significant generalisation’ that was tied up with the early years of
this shift in geography, with this leading him to turn to analysing the media of history and myth,
art and literature, in an effort to try and understand the perceptions of landscape by exploring
their functional and aesthetic uses (Lowenthal , 1975a, 1975b, 1977, 1979, 1980; Lowenthal and
Prince 1976).
As this suggests then, ‘heritage’ and ‘tradition’ are themes to which Lowenthal had a much
deeper connection. Much of his earliest scholarship (1968; Lowenthal and Prince 1964, 1965,
1969), for example, drew heavily on ground-breaking work such as Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin
Land (1950), W.G. Hoskins’s The Making of the English Landscape (1955), and Raymond
Williams’ Culture and Society (1958), not to mention Karl Popper’s famous critique The Poverty
of Historicism (1957). Indeed, these early articles constitute some of Lowenthal’s most innovative –
particularly the 1960s collaborations with Hugh Prince exploring the differences between English
and American dispositions toward the past, and his mid-70s explorations of the wider theme of
representation and ‘modes of celebrating the past’. His 1964 collaboration with Prince, for
example, argues for a connection between the rise of British concern for heritage and the post-
WWII shift from railways to roads that resulted in the traveller seeing far more of the predomi-
nantly built-up matrix, and also notes the dominance of the upper and upper-middle class
mindset to preservation with its ‘a pronounced rural bias’ (Lowenthal and Prince 1964, 325)
This was a radically original argument for 1964, drawing on cutting-edge ideas around the politics
of culture and perception, while also being at the forefront of emerging social history in its
employment of new types of sources.
And it was actually here that the framework of The Past is a Foreign Country was developed,
with Lowenthal’s 1975 article ‘Past Time, Present Place’ in particular constituting an important
early exploration of the social utility of the past and the significance of place and space as
mnemonic devices (see also Lowenthal 1981). The 1977 article ‘The Bicentennial Landscape’ is
equally important, offering one of the earliest illustrations of how tenuous the link between
historical fact and fiction need be, and how dominant historical discourses were in turn reinforced
by preservation practice. Indeed, while the dominance of The Past is a Foreign Country has seen
Lowenthal’s scholarly output considered most frequently through the lens of heritage studies,
much of his output to the early-70s can arguably be more usefully understood through the frame
of the ‘new’ memory studies that was emerging at the time. One of the core features distinguishing
this from the ‘old’ memory work, for example, was not subject, but approach, with the ‘new’
seeking to understand the interrelationship between different versions of history in public.
But while there might be a clear heritage trajectory in Lowenthal’s oeuvre, his work also sits
quite uncomfortably not just with CHS, but with the work of others in the canon. While
Wright, Hewison, and Samuel, for example, all take positions on heritage that border on the
polemic, Lowenthal takes the other extreme by never actually defining his theoretical position,
or articulating a clear methodology. In The Past is a Foreign Country, for example, he states: ‘I
have not conducted exhaustive research on most of the topics this book surveys. Instead
I have tried to fashion a plausible synthesis out of quite heterogeneous materials’ (1985, xxv-i).
This in part is Lowenthal being self-effacing, but is also a recognition that his work on
heritage represents a dipping in-and-out of a range of material that supports the particular,
but not explicitly defined, position he takes. Indeed, even in the 1992 Manchester University
debate on the notion of the past being a foreign country – of which Lowenthal led the
affirmative – he began his argument for the motion by stating his ambivalence to the central
thesis of his own book (see Ingold 1996, 167–171).
Strange as this may seem, this is but one of a number of odd dynamics that span Lowenthal’s
writing. Perhaps most concerning is the peculiar lack of engagement with debate across not just
heritage studies, but the wider range of disciplines from which he draws. In part, this is
a consequence of Lowenthal writing style, which is one of conscious narration and ‘thick
10 K. GENTRY AND L. SMITH

description’ rather than active engagement, but this nonetheless results in a work fundamentally
impressionistic in nature and lacking in sustained argument and critical substance. Such criticisms
are by no means new, with a number of commentators noting soon after the book’s original
release that it lacked theoretical framing and ignored the political economy of the past (Webb
1986; Ranger 1987; Harris 1988). Indeed, if we look at Lowenthal subsequent work on heritage, his
discussion of other works is generally limited to selective quotation as opposed to critical
engagement. When he does engage with current debates – as he does in a 2009 article on the
fate of the museum ‘Patrons, populists, apologists’ – he tends to draw far more heavily on
journalism than current scholarship, with this particular article leaning heavily on the work of
the cultural commentator Josie Appleton and colleagues writing for the libertarian online journal
spiked (Lowenthal 2009). Lowenthal himself contributed to this reactionary publication in a 2006
piece titled ‘Heritage Wars’, in which he railed against the so-called ‘sacred rights’ of interest
groups, asserting that heritage fosters chauvinism, and challenging the special claims of
Indigenous peoples and other interests to cultural essentialism and tribalism (2006a). This is an
argument he has presented in at least five other instances (Lowenthal 2000, 2005b, 2006b, 2009a,
2011a). In other works he defines heritage as fabrication, which demands and gets people to
simply believe in it, and to have faith in the pasts created by heritage fabrication (1998a, 2011b).
His concern here is that a sense of ‘future stewardship’ has been lost, and that humanity has
allowed ‘the demands of the insistent present to dominate government and corporate action’ over
cultural and natural preservation, so that the ‘international conventions [that] have championed
stewardship of resources for future generations’ have failed to be put into practice (Lowenthal
2000, 2005a, 21).
In this frame, in a recent multi-authored review of The Past is a Foreign Country – Revisited,
David C. Harvey suggests that the lack of engagement with theoretical, social, and political
developments in heritage in the edition paradoxically leaves the new work firmly in the mid-
1980s and presents an image of heritage as a strangely stable phenomenon (Murphy et al. 2017,
207–208). Lowenthal’s response was simply to make a case for the apparent objectivity of the
historian and the profanity of participatory action, retorting ‘I am also loath to align my capacious
past [. . .] with critical discourse analysis, the postmodern rehash of seventeenth-century scepti-
cism that faulted all history as faked’ (210).
But if we begin to unpack this, the problem is not just Lowenthal’s failure to engage with
theory and debate, but that his focus on the psychological and social is such that the political
rarely gets a look in. The limitations this places on his explanation of certain developments is thus
often fragmentary, and at times misleading. Take the example of ‘Stewarding the past in
a Perplexing Present’ (2000), where he opens with the claim that the problems facing cultural
heritage are rooted in a growing obsession that society has with the remnants of the past. While in
itself a perfectly valid (be it simplistic) argument, it is the determination to weigh the growth of
heritage as ‘an obsession’ – in other words, from a socio-psychological paradigm – alone, that
leads Lowenthal to conclude that heritage fosters chauvinism and is ‘the special province of the
victims’ (18). The predetermination of the psychologically rooted ‘why’ here leads to a complete
neglect of the wider ‘implications’ and rationale of this use of heritage. There is, to put it simply,
a failure to recognise the profoundness of heritage as a hegemonic process. Further evidence of
this can be seen in ‘Why Sanctions Seldom Work’ (2005), where his argument against the
exclusivity of cultural claims is grounded in the logic of anti-essentialism. Challenging the notion
of Indigenous ‘ownership’ of their ancestral heritage, his rationalisation is that ‘[t]his is politically
correct, but practically wrong – wrong because we are all multiply mixed, wrong because ancestral
pasts cannot be possessed anyway’ (2005b, 409). Ignoring the growing body of work exploring
heritage and exclusion, he instead argues that growth of a culture of ‘victimhood’ only ‘encourages
empathy but hampers critical thinking’ (2009b, 916). Museums’ attempts to be more inclusive or
socially democratic, he further adds, have their place, ‘[b]ut they should not be allowed to
overshadow the detached distancing that enables museums uniquely to serve, and to be widely
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 11

seen, as reliable vehicles of public illumination’ (2009a, 30). This is similarly evident in his
response to Harvey’s (and equally Dydia DeLyser’s) critique of Revisited, where – drawing on
a series of quotes and ‘warnings’ from Socrates and Erasmus to Goethe and Zola – his argument
for the ‘sanctity’ of the elite version of heritage and the shortcomings of the ‘Rhodes must fall’
debate are rooted in a basic failure to appreciate the hegemonic role that heritage and heritage
practice can play (Murphy et al. 2017, 210–213).
But there is also more to it. Lowenthal’s argument here conflates collected and collective
memory – something that Wulf Kansteiner suggests historians commonly rationalise by empha-
sising the role of human agency in the construction of collective memories (Fogu and Kansteiner
2006, 289). As Kansteiner notes, however, this ultimately fails to recognise that collective mem-
ories have their own dynamics and rules of engagement that render psychological and psycho-
analytical methods pointless. For this reason, Iwona Irwin-Zarecka argues, ‘when speaking of
social forgetting, we are best advised to keep psychological or psychoanalytical categories at bay
and to focus, rather, on the social, political, and cultural factors at work’ (1994, 116). With this in
mind, Nancy Wood suggests that ‘[I]f particular representations of the past have permeated the
public domain, it is because they embody an intentionality – social, political, institutional and so
on – that promotes or authorizes their entry’ (1999, 2). For Lowenthal the problem is all the more
acute owing to his lack of engagement with the voluminous literature that has emerged in the last
few decades that explores the innate complexities of memory as a field of study. Even in Revisited
(2015) the work of only a select few leading memory scholars are mentioned – be it in footnotes –
while there remains nothing that constitutes meaningful engagement with debate around the
complexities of the socio-psychological approach to individual and collective memory that has
dominated this literature. Indeed, the issue is wholly dealt with in the simple note that, ‘At the
same time, memory itself becomes a leading topic of historical discourse, alike of personal recall,
as in Holocaust testimonies, and of collective memory, from the pioneering work of Maurice
Halbwachs to the flood of group-oriented syntheses in the wake of Pierre Nora and his colla-
borators’ (2015, 405, 406).
The distinction between history and heritage – central as it is to Nora and Hewison as well as
Lowenthal – is equally problematic. In Lowenthal’s work it is evident from the late-1970s, but by
the early 1990s comes to constitute a core element of his perspective. Distilling the past into ‘icons
of identity’, the narrative of heritage is partial and selective, offering ‘bogus’ history which sanitises
the past and ignores complex historical processes. By the mid-1990s the imagery and discourse
around this distinction becomes highly biblical – as reflected in Lowenthal’s use of The Heritage
Crusades as the title of his 1996 book, in which heritage is increasingly berated as cult like; as
something that requires and supports faith; and as something made inappropriately sacred.14 It
has since become a disease, a pandemic aliment, an epidemic of rivalry and conflict (2011a, 133).
This, he further argues, contrasts with the work of historians where ‘testable truth is [the] chief
hallmark’, and where the ‘[h]istorians’ credibility depends on their sources being open to general
scrutiny’ (1996, 120). Central to this distinction then is Lowenthal’s suggestion that heritage is
a way of coming to the present rather than understanding the past – the latter being the realm of
history. Or, to look at it from an epistemological perspective, the historian consciously pursues
objectivity, while ‘truth’ is of little concern for heritage.
Yet it is surprising that Lowenthal seeks to cleave such a blunt distinction considering that by
the mid-1980s this reified image of the professional historian had undergone at least 40 years of
consistent attack in texts including R.G. Collingwood’s famous The Idea of History (1946) with its
case for the social role, social construction, and present-centredness of human engagement with
‘the past’, and E.H. Carr’s argument (channelling Benedetto Croce) that history is ‘the past
through the eyes of the present’ (Carr 1961, 22). Though based on facts, the argument goes,
strictly speaking, history is ‘not factual at all, but a series of accepted judgments’ (1961, 55; Carr
here quoting Barraclough 1955, 14) or to use Hayden White’s term ‘pre-figurations’ (White 1973).
Heritage might not be History, but neither was History!
12 K. GENTRY AND L. SMITH

The history-heritage dialectical is as hegemonic as it is epistemological, yet the failure to

acknowledge that social and cultural influences shaped history as much as heritage results in
what the sociologist Margaret Archer has called the ‘downward conflation’ of structuralism –
essentially a conflation between structure and agency that assumes that the structural character-
istics of the dominant media correlate to the perspectives of its users (Archer 1995). These sorts of
ideas were supported by Nick Merriman’s Beyond the Glass Case (1991), a work that constitutes
one of the earliest systematic efforts to discover what heritage ‘meant’ to recipients. Arguing
against Lowenthal’s (and Nora and Hewison’s) formulation that heritage could be reduced to
being a part of a ‘dominant ideology’, Merriman’s study concluded that different communities
found different values in the past, and that when viewed within the individual-collective, personal-
national frameworks, no one attitude to the past was more valuable than another. The limitations
of Lowenthal’s position similarly becomes clear if considered from the perspective of CHS. While
at an epistemological level his argument of professional and amateur narratives of the past being
different links in a ‘chain of popular memory’ is similar to the overarching frame Samuel presents,
the absence of ‘the political’ in Lowenthal could not be more different from Samuel, for whom the
political is inseparable from the social (Johnson 1999, 171). Indeed, this sort of reification of the
professional historian would be at the root of Samuel’s attack on ‘heritage baiters’ – of which
Lowenthal was amongst the charged – with Samuel highlighting how the modern notion of ‘the
past’ as being ‘less legitimate’ than History was rooted in late-nineteenth-century efforts to
establish history as a scholarly discipline, and the revival of the old debate around ‘ancients and
moderns’ (Samuel 1994, 160–163, 259–271; Gentry 2015).

Conclusion
Considered in its entirety, a number of critical observations can be made of Lowenthal’s oeuvre.
Chief among these is a patrician sense of the cultured, disinterested social commentator who
reveres classical, historical and biblical knowledge over the emotive and special pleadings of so-
called ‘tribal’ concerns. Plugging into this is a narrow concern with heritage as a fundamentally
socio-psychological process – a view that supports this reverence for ‘the official’, while giving
little credence to the broader political and hegemonic role that the past plays. The point here is
that much of Lowenthal’s work advances through self-sufficient arguments, in which the theore-
tical and methodological frameworks employed remain implicit and unspoken, and reside within
a particular understanding of history, and within a particular political value-set which owes
a great deal to the hegemonic discourse. His work leaves unquestioned the technical concerns
of heritage with preservation, while political use of the past is reduced to particularistic conflicts
and the special pleadings of interest groups, and systematic analysis is foregone. Indeed, as we
have argued above, even by the standards of the day much of Lowenthal’s work is left wanting. He
was, of course, not alone in this attitude toward the relationship between history and heritage,
with a similar charge standing against Hewison and Nora, and to a lesser degree much of the
1980s heritage scholarship.
So how then should be viewed Lowenthal’s work today, and how do we explain the
phenomenally strong shadow that citations suggest The Past is a Foreign Country has cast
on heritage scholarship? First off we need to be careful not to conflate citations with influence,
as counterintuitive as this may initially sound. Indeed, despite the growth in the ever-
increasing citation gradient of The Past is a Foreign Country (Appendix 4) ‘influence’ is but
one factor, with others including the wider growth of interest in heritage; the canonical nature
of the work that sees it discussed in the context of the development of scholarly interest in
heritage rather than being engaged with critically; and even the scope of the work and nature
of Lowenthal’s writing style. Despite its age, The Past is a Foreign Country, for example,
remains one of few substantial exploration of the longer whence to heritage – that in certain
ways heritage itself has a long ‘tradition’. A smattering of scholars have certainly explored
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 13

earlier uses of the past (for example, Cressy 1989,; Wardman 1976), however, the relative
dearth of material here is particularly significant if we consider that even today the discourse
around the history of heritage focused almost exclusively on the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, despite David C. Harvey’s warning that we need to be careful ‘not draw any lines of
temporal closure, or view the entire heritage concept as a product of later 19th- and 20th-
century cultural change without origin’ (Harvey 2001, 326). The Past is a Foreign Country’s ‘big
picture’ perspective has been equally valuable, with the work’s popularity a tribute to the
prodigious volume of research and example that Lowenthal brings to bear in his narrative,
where – much like Raphael Samuel – he employs the technique of ‘thick description’ (possibly
owing something to Clifford Geertz) in which a mass of detail and flurry of examples are
deployed to recreate a powerful sense of the way something was. This style of writing requires
a unique breadth of cultural knowledge, and indeed, a flick through Lowenthal’s footnotes
highlights a fantastic range of sources – from literature and history, to news, films, advertise-
ments and community flyers. Indeed, in this capacity the work has served as a valuable and
popular introduction to heritage, with the work held by almost twice as many libraries globally
than the next most popular heritage text.15
If, however, we consider The Past is a Foreign Country from the perspective of CHS, the work
is far more obtuse. It has little in the way of legacy for CHS. But this is the point – the two are
intrinsically different projects concerned with fundamentally different questions, with Lowenthal
seemingly not interested in engaging with any ‘CHS-style’ project in the same way that CHS sees
Lowenthal’s more circumscribed perspective as part of the very heritage that he describes. Indeed,
concerned as it is with the power relations that have been formed and operate via the deployment
of heritage as a process, CHS effectively holds that the Lowenthalian perspective ultimately
regulates and reproduces the very narrative it seeks to untangle. The Past is a Foreign Country
was of a different generation, and as Olwig (2003) suggests, it was foundational. Yet intellectually
it has also gone the way of most first-generation scholarship. If we were to seek out the
antecedents of CHS, more fertile ground would be found in the ‘lesser’ publications the 1980s
and 1990s that linked heritage to power relations. To analysis this intellectual debt properly,
however, is a paper in itself.

Notes
1. This paper was researched and drafted during 2016–18 prior to David Lowenthal’s death in September 2018;
it was under review at the time of his death. Our thanks to the two reviewers for their constructive and
thoughtful feedback.
2. Citations are based on Google scholar, while global library holdings can be found in WorldCat.
3. A glance at Google Scholar, for example, sees the number of publications discussing/engaging with ‘critical
heritage studies’ as growing from 32 in 2011, to 74 in 2013, to 171 in 2015, to 211 in 2017.
4. The earliest usage of the phrase discovered in the drafting of this article was the ‘Critical Heritage Studies
Symposium’ held at the University of Cape Town in August 2002. Graham and Howard’s The Ashgate
Research Companion to Heritage and Identity (Aldershot 2008) is typical of the more common use of the
phrase from around 2007, where it is employed as an umbrella for discussion of the recent critical turn in
heritage studies.
5. According to Google Scholar, as of 8 February 2018, the English translation has 6981; the original French,
1396.
6. The Heritage Industry was a polemical take on his earlier and more measured publication In Anger: British
culture in the Cold War (1981).
7. See, for example, Ian Nairn’s ‘Outrage’ special issue of Architectural Review in 1955, or Gordon Cullen, The
Concise Townscape (1961).
8. The limitations of Hewison’s ‘climate of decline’ argument, for example, are a central thread of Walsh’s The
Representation of the Past (1992), while John Urry took Hewison’s analysis to task in The Tourist Gaze
(1990).
9. For details of this debate see John Corner and Silvia Harvey (eds) Enterprise and Heritage: Crosscurrents of
national culture (London 1991), and Bella Dicks, Heritage, Place and Community (Cardiff 2000).
14 K. GENTRY AND L. SMITH

10. The key explorations of tradition and historical memory between 1970 and 1985, for example, include
Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), Edward Shils’ Tradition (1981), and Ernest Gellner’s
Nations and Nationalism (1983) in Anthropology; Anthony Smith’s Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986) in
Sociology; and John Breuilly’s Nationalism and the State (1982), Benedict Anderson’s Imagined
Communities (1983), Hobsbawm and Ranger’s the Invention of Tradition (1983), and Nora’s Les Lieux de
mémoire (1984) in History.
11. Although dominant, there are notable exceptions, with critical work being undertaken from the 1990s onwards
within geography, with, for instance, Brian Graham, Gregory Ashworth, and John Tunbridge, A Geography of
Heritage: Power, Culture and Economy (2000); in sociology by, Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History,
Theory, Politics (1995), and Dicks, Heritage, Place and Community (2000), amongst others; in archaeology,
Walsh, The Representation of the Past (1994), Denis Byrne, ‘Deep Nation: Australia’s acquisition of an
Indigenous past’, Aboriginal History, 20 (1996), 82–107, and John Carman, Valuing Ancient Things:
Archaeology and Law (1996); in history, Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place (1997); and in anthropology,
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage (1998); Susanne Küchler
and Adrian Forty (eds), The Art of Forgetting (1999), and Sharon Macdonald, The Politics of Display (1998),
amongst others. However, the body of work within the two dominant areas defined above dwarfed such work.
12. Interestingly, the graph also shows a change taking place between 2005 and 2007 after which the growth-rate
of citations of the broader-based 1990s scholarship tends to increase - this incidentally being the period in
which scholarly interest in more critical approaches to heritage begins to rise.
13. Lowenthal has elsewhere suggested elsewhere that his interest in heritage began in the closing year of
the Second World War, when he worked alongside a team of American geographers in western Europe
identifying buildings and landscapes of strategic significance to the US Office of Strategic Services
(Lowenthal 2007).
14. Lowenthal’s central thesis here also echoes other theorists who have positioned ‘heritage’ as a form of
‘secular religion’, such as Carol Duncan’s Civilising Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (1995), Donald
Horne’s the Great Museum: the Re-presentation of History (1984).
15. WorldCat global book holdings (as of 14/2/2018) show 1357 libraries holding copies of The Past is a Foreign
Country, almost twice the number of the second most commonly held text, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s
Destination culture at 825, and three times the most heavily cited recent text - Smith’s Uses of Heritage -
which is held in 507 libraries. Of the traditional canon, Samuel’s Theatres of Memory has 372; Wright’s On
Living in an Old Country 273, and Hewison’s Heritage Industry 247.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors
Kynan Gentry is a research fellow in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia. In
addition to earlier holding research fellow and lectureship positions at the Australian National University, he
previously worked as a historian for History Group, Ministry for Culture and Heritage in New Zealand. He has
authored and edited four books, the most recent being History, Heritage, and Colonialism (2015), Manchester
University Press.
Laurajane Smith is the Director of the Centre of Heritage and Museum Studies, at the Australian National
University. She is a Fellow the Academy of the Social Science in Australia; founder of the Association of Critical
Heritage Studies; editor of the International Journal of Heritage Studies and co-general editor (with William Logan)
of the Routledge Series Key Issues in Cultural Heritage. She has authored or edited fourteen books, most notably
Uses of Heritage (2006, Routledge) and Intangible Heritage (2009, edited with Natsuko Akagawa)

ORCID
Laurajane Smith http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8852-6976

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18 K. GENTRY AND L. SMITH

Appendices

Appendix 1. Key, and most heavily cited books on heritage, 1980–1999. Botted line marks 2005.
1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015 2017
Bennett, The Birth of the Museum:
7 10 29 48 86 139 208 295 419 509
History, Theory, Politics (1995)
Walsh The Representation of the Past
4 29 67 105 165 215 291 392 472 572 695 821 934
(1992)

Hayden, The Power of Place (1997) 30 96 167 260 390 537 748 981 1270 1520 1730

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination
19 92 242 451 739 1070 1470 1900 2410 2840
Culture (1998)
Macdonald, The Politics of Display
3 26 53 87 124 171 225 228 346 394
(1998)
Lowenthal, The Past is a foreign
11 32 80 162 278 452 677 928 1230 1600 2090 2700 3380 4110 4910 5760 6580
country (1985)

Samuel, Theatres of memory (1994) 17 81 157 302 450 609 804 1010 1260 1510 1840 2140

Wright, On Living in an Old Country

2 16 39 43 66 90 134 170 211 258 317 363 419 497 563 654 715
(1985)
Hewison, The Heritage
35 67 136 227 350 447 560 684 843 1040 1210 1410 1650 1900 2130
Industry(1987)
Trigger [1989] A History of
28 104 199 305 423 563 748 937 1210 1520 1870 2270 2730 3160
Archaeological Thought,
Silberman (1989) Between Past
3 10 20 28 47 60 82 108 125 150 166 208 232 251
and Present:
Horne 1984 The Great Museum: 9 23 46 71 99 127 154 188 229 267 302 329 363 395 413 441

7000

6000

5000
Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (1995)
Walsh The Representation of the Past (1992)
Hayden, The Power of Place (1997)
4000 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture (1998)
Macdonald, The Politics of Display (1998)
Lowenthal, The Past is a foreign country (1985)
Samuel, Theatres of memory (1994)

3000 Wright, On Living in an Old Country (1985)

Hewison, The Heritage Industry(1987)
Trigger [1989] A History of Archaeological Thought,
Silberman (1989) Between Past and Present:
Horne 1984 The Great Museum:
2000

1000

0
1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015 2017
Appendix 2. Lowenthal citations cross-referenced to other works.

Citations Cross-refs with Cross-refs as % of Citations Cross-refs with Cross-refs as % of Citations Cross-refs with Cross-refs as % of
Title to 2005 Lowenthal 1985 total citations to 2008 Lowenthal 1985 total citations to 2011 Lowenthal 1985 total citations
Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: 48 28 58.3 104 44 42.3 208 53 25.5
History, Theory, Politics (1995)
Walsh, The Representation of the Past 291 68 23.4 432 88 20.4 572 109 19.1
(1992)
Carman, Valuing Ancient Things 39 6 15.4 62 11 17.7 84 12 14.3
(1996)
Hayden, The Power of Place (1997) 390 66 16.9 635 91 14.3 981 106 10.8
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination 451 27 6.0 884 54 6.1 1470 80 5.4
Culture (1998)
Küchler & Forty, The Art of Forgetting 46 11 23.9 98 20 20.4 171 30 17.5
(1999)
Macdonald, The Politics of Display 87 4 4.6 146 7 4.8 225 10 4.4
(1998)
Lowenthal, The Past is a foreign 2090 0.0 2700 0.0 4110 0.0
country (1985)
Samuel, Theatres of memory (1994) 619 76 12.3 898 127 14.1 1260 159 12.6
Wright, On Living in an Old Country 317 66 20.8 389 91 23.4 497 110 22.1
(1985)
Hewison, The Heritage Industry 843 193 22.9 1130 270 23.9 1410 311 22.1
(1987)
Trigger, A History of Archaeological 937 33 3.5 1370 46 3.4 1870 53 2.8
Thought (1989)
Silberman, Between Past and Present 108 15 13.9 139 24 17.3 166 33 19.9
(1989)
Greenberg et al., Thinking about 68 2 2.9 115 4 3.5 187 6 3.2
Exhibitions (1996)
Horne, The Great Museum (1984) 267 27 10.1 319 35 11.0 363 36 9.9
Nora, Between memory and history 1110 170 15.3 1870 306 16.4 3110 464 14.9
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES

(1989)
19
 20
K. GENTRY AND L. SMITH

Appendix 3. Cross-references between Lowenthal (1985), Wright (1985), Hewison (1987), and Walsh (1992). Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998) is also detailed.

2005 2008 2005 X-refs As 2008 X-refs As 2005 X-refs As 2008 X-refs As 2005 X-refs As 2008 X-refs As 2005 X-refs As 2008 X-refs As
cites cites to Walsh % to Walsh % to Wright % to Wright % to Hewisn % to Hewisn % to Lowth % to Lowth %
Wright (1985) 317 389 25 7.9 35 9.0 89 28.1 110 28.3 62 19.6 84 21.6
Hewison (1987) 843 1130 86 10.2 119 10.5 140 16.6 170 15.0 328 38.9 329 29.1
Walsh (1992) 291 432 29 10.0 33 7.6 77 26.5 107 24.8 105 36.1 120 27.8
Kirshenblatt- 415 884 28 6.7 58 6.6 8 1.9 15 1.7 18 4.3 42 4.8 29 7.0 58 6.6
Gimblett
(1998)
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 21

Appendix 4. Citations of key heritage texts, 1985–2017.

1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015 2017
Bennett, The Birth of the Museum:
7 10 29 48 86 139 208 295 419 509
History, Theory, Politics (1995)
Walsh The Representation of the Past
4 29 67 105 165 215 291 392 472 572 695 821 934
(1992)

Hayden, The Power of Place (1997) 30 96 167 260 390 537 748 981 1270 1520 1730

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination
19 92 242 451 739 1070 1470 1900 2410 2840
Culture (1998)
Macdonald, The Politics of Display
3 26 53 87 124 171 225 228 346 394
(1998)
Lowenthal, The Past is a foreign
11 32 80 162 278 452 677 928 1230 1600 2090 2700 3380 4110 4910 5760 6580
country (1985)

Samuel, Theatres of memory (1994) 17 81 157 302 450 609 804 1010 1260 1510 1840 2140

Wright, On Living in an Old Country

2 16 39 43 66 90 134 170 211 258 317 363 419 497 563 654 715
(1985)
Hewison, The Heritage
35 67 136 227 350 447 560 684 843 1040 1210 1410 1650 1900 2130
Industry(1987)
Trigger [1989] A History of
28 104 199 305 423 563 748 937 1210 1520 1870 2270 2730 3160
Archaeological Thought,
Silberman (1989) Between Past
3 10 20 28 47 60 82 108 125 150 166 208 232 251
and Present:
Horne 1984 The Great Museum: 9 23 46 71 99 127 154 188 229 267 302 329 363 395 413 441

7000

Ashworth et al, A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture and Economy

(2000)
Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (1995)
6000
Dicks, Heritage, Place and Community (2000)

Walsh The Representation of the Past (1992)

5000
Byrne, 'Western hegemony in archaeological heritage management',
History and Anthropology, 5:2 (1991)
Carman, Valuing Ancient Things: Archaeology and Law (1996)
4000 Hayden, The Power of Place (1997)

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture (1998)

3000 Küchler & Forty (eds), The Art of Forgetting (1999)

Lowenthal, The Past is a foreign country (1985)

Samuel, Theatres of memory (1994)

2000
Macdonald, The Politics of Display (1998)

Wright, On Living in an Old Country (1985)

1000
Hewison, The Heritage Industry(1987)

Trigger [1989] A History of Archaeological Thought,

0
1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015 2017