JESSICA RODA Ph.D
Anthropologist-Ethnomusicologist
Georgetown University
Center for Jewish Civilization
2015
La diversité des patrimoines. Du rejet du discours à l’éloge des pratiques.
Co-editor with Daniela Moisa, Presses de l’Université du Québec.
Heritage has long been studied to build, analyze, think, understand, and interpret an object which unifies a nation, a group or a community. However, with the increase in mobility space, the fluidization of borders between nation-states, and with new media and technologies, the essentialist vision of heritage has increasingly been challenged by the phenomena of identity diversification. In a way, the uniformity of heritage makes way for diversity of heritages.
In this context, how does heritage, based on divergent identity references, coexist while the patrimonialization most often aims at stabilizing and affirming identities in the singular? How does heritage relate to the political project of diversity? What does this diversity reveal about economic, political, ideological, cultural, and social trends in the study of societies and, even more, about the heritage itself?
These are the questions that this editing volume addresses by means of ethnographies in a variety of geocultural and geopolitical contexts, ranging from the Americas to Europe through Africa. More broadly, this book aims to go beyond the discourse on the heritage and diversity couple, typically perceived as essentialist, in a reflection on migration, transcending the geographic territoriality associated with it. Beyond the polyphony of heritages, these are the territorial, social, and economic challenges, policies and symbols of cultural diversity and heritage that the volume questions.