Problematizing the Idea of Heritage Management

This chapter aims to problematize heritage management, focusing on the way it came to be framed and how it turned into a practice with different orientations in the academic fields of heritage studies and public archaeology. Both heritage and management are concerned with value, but in distinct yet complimentary ways. These two perspectives are not oppositional, but counterparts entwined around one elemental fact: the social and moral transformations that have made the idea of “management” to be closer to the idea of “business” in the present day. The intellectual effort of such problematizing process seeks to develop a line of reasoning through which heritage management can be understood and undertaken as a complex practice. While acknowledging the importance of the maintenance of heritage value in the dynamics of contemporary societies, this chapter concludes that heritage management in its most basic sense is a concept that needs further theorizing.