Between ennoblement and exclusion: heritage policies in Kraków

The global career of the notion of “heritage” as one of the central figures of social imagination is undoubtedly an offshoot of the memory boom which Sharon Macdonald described in the context of postwar European identity formation processes (2013, p. 3). In a world of fluid modernity (Bauman 1994) the game of “heritage” allows the participants to drop anchor, look behind, and create an impression of control over the passage of time. The imprecision of the idea is simultaneously its strength and its weakness, as is shown on the one hand by the great interest being displayed in selected elements of cultural heritage, and on the other, by the unending disputes and controversies over what should be the object of heritization, who is entitled to control it and on what principles. Gregory J. Ashworth and John E. Tunbridge’s lapidary definition, which is readily used in Cultural Studies, only outwardly facilitates a precise demarcation of the concept. From the sentence “Heritage is the contemporary usage of the past and is consciously shaped from history, its survivals and memories, in response to current needs for it” (1999, p. 105) we do not learn anything about the objects of those activities. We do not know who exactly is occupied with “processing” the past, who defines the needs, and finally whose memories are subject to manipulation. It would seem that the source of the above misunderstandings lie in the very term “heritage” itself, on account of its ambiguity and of being firmly rooted in common knowledge. In the case of the Polish language, the word was at first a legal term meaning an inheritance (dziedzictwo) from forebears (dziad) (Brückner 1921). At present, its semantic field encompasses a range of other signifiers, which function in the natural language as its synonyms, expanding the sphere of connotation. The collection of such synonyms also contains expressions such as legacy, tradition, and monument, and even, in the broad sense of the term, culture. Heritage is understood by those using the term subjectively to mean specific material and symbolic cultural resources, existing per se, which the community has inherited from preceding generations and with which it has an emotional relationship.