Cultural heritage and identity

The protection of the cultural heritage is one of the extremely current topics in the process of the formation of different identities, cultural politics and development strategies of the contemporary world. This is the reason why it is crucial to analyze on the one hand the way in which cultural heritage is defined and used, and on the other hand to research what is excluded from the process of preserving and representing the past experiences (in the other words, what is not cultural heritage). This theme unquestionably speaks about the ways in which the state, or any other type of community, wants to represent itself - to the others, and to its own members. Therefore the research of shaping, preserving and presenting what is considered to be cultural heritage is totally discursive, and consequently changeable. Accordingly, diachronic analysis of the way in which cultural heritage is conceptualized, gives the answers to the following questions: what did we want to be in certain periods (how did we want to look like) and how the strategies of identity and representation did change, as well as in which ways were they carried out in the legislation and in practice. The special emphasis in this complex project will be on the discourses through which the images of the past have been constructed, and on the ways in which they correspond with the contemporary popular/high cultural patterns.