_Possessed by the Past : The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of
History_, by David Lowenthal
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From Kirkus Reviews , 07/01/96:
A keenly observant, if at times pretentious, exploration of identity
politics writ large at the national level. What Lowenthal
(Geography/University College, London) calls ``the cult of heritage'' is
seen today in historical theme parks; museum and commemorative policy;
child adoption; a booming illicit trade in art and antiquities; and most
ominously, in xenophobia, racism, and genocide. Frequently heritage
involves a national or ethnic trauma that needs to be recalled, such as
the Holocaust for the Jews, the Potato Famine for the Irish, and the
wars that kept Poland subjugated for years. At times, however, this
emphasis sparks a kind of victim politics that brooks no disagreements
and can even lead to a cycle of mutual grievances and bloodshed, as in
Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and the Middle East. Unlike history, Lowenthal
notes, heritage makes no attempt at objectivity as it views the past
with present-minded purpose. Heritage further deforms the past because
it is ``popularized, commoditized and politicized,'' in the form of
kitschy theme parks like Disney's aborted Historyland and the more
ambitious if still somewhat
misleading Williamsburg (where management is still uncertain how fully
to depict slavery in this colonial capital). Lowenthal is especially
canny about heritage as an all-consuming growth industry, noting that
Stonehenge is now protected from predatory
tourists by barbed wire. However, he has caught more than the net of his
argument can reasonably hold (it's a wide range from essentially liberal
curatorial issues to the horrors of genocide), and his prose aims for
high-flown rhetoric when a little earthiness
might have been helpful. Moreover, he never really shows the reader how
to separate the wheat of heritage (its function as ``creative act'')
from the chaff (the many faults he describes). Still, a provocative
examination of how nations worship at, and are
sometimes sacrificed on, the altar of memory. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus
Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Card catalog description
Heritage is a most compelling modern cause. In the last quarter century
it has expanded from a small elite pastime to a major
popular crusade - a crusade to save and celebrate anything and all that
we inherit from the past. Everything - from Euro-Disney
to the Holocaust Museum, from Balkan enmities to the Northern Irish
troubles, from Elvis memorabilia to the Elgin marbles -
bears the marks of the cult of heritage. Heritage attachments pervade
politics and education and form our views on such diverse
realms as heredity, environment, racism, and tourism. Enthralled by the
past, we deploy it for present benefits of every kind. A
goodly heritage persuades us we belong to a community of like-minded
folk and act within a tradition sanctified by age-old
experience. Heritage is all the more valued in a world where turbulent
change and global fears make the present seem frightful
and the future fearsome. Yet the very zeal with which heritage is
pursued leads to countless abuses of the treasured past. Roots
and relics become weapons to foment hatred of others, to warp historical
truth, to deform our own legacy, to further some class
or cause. Despite new recognition that the world's diverse legacies
belong to and require the care of all mankind, heritage
passions remain animated largely by self-regarding chauvinism. In
Possessed by the Past, David Lowenthal explains the rise of
this new obsession with the past and shows its power for both good and
evil. He probes the passions that generate a need to
find or invent a prideful past - or to mourn a grievous one - and shows
how they are similar the world over. He demonstrates
why and how relics, ancestry, and memory today, more than ever, become a
source of both pride and peril.

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