Global Heritage: A Reader

Global Heritage: A Reader examines the practice and politics of global heritage preservation and its resulting social implications. Chapters are organized to include a review of relevant, recent literature as well as providing detailed descriptions of innovative projects, studies, trends or problematics that chart the way forward for future studies and heritage directions.

Contributors discuss the productive tensions, new challenges and emergent areas that students and professionals need to be aware of in the decades to come. This structure reveals the dynamic nature of the field, and is as geographically inclusive as possible, reflecting the many perspectives and writings that have been produced in various fields, whilst exposing the complex nature of contemporary heritage issues.

The Reader explores new directions in heritage scholarship, acknowledging and building upon fundamental established perspectives from archaeology, anthropology, politics, nationalism, ethics and materiality studies.

Lynn Meskell is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Archaeology Center at Stanford University. Before coming to Stanford in 2005 she was Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. She is Honorary Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Some of her recent books and edited collections include Cosmopolitan Archaeologies (2009) and The Nature of Culture: The New South Africa (Blackwell, 2011). Her new research focuses on the role of UNESCO in terms of heritage rights, sovereignty and international politics.