Cultural heritage as a strategy for social needs and community identity

Our past is woven into the fabric of our present; our awareness of the past is constitutive of our sense of identity and contemporary community. This chapter examines how heritage may be interwoven with strategies to meet social needs in the context of attempts to preserve a sense of community. We wish to pose a question: Is it that heritage is itself a social need, and ultimately without heritage there can be no society? The need to engage in practices of community preservation through heritage is a feeling that can arise in the face of contemporary development trends that are often perceived as compromising the social fabric. In this chapter we contend that any critically engaged conceptualization of heritage in the opening decades of the twenty‐first century is best achieved by seeing heritage as an integral part of a broader set of cultural, social, political, and economic practices. We position heritage not merely as a deliberate sociopolitical practice, but also as one of the many everyday and often unconscious strategies employed in the process of addressing social needs. Because social needs play out at different levels in society, and different social institutions are involved, heritage is similarly ideally understood and tackled through in‐depth ethnography and bottom‐up management and policy‐framework approaches. "From chapter