Examining international case studies including USA, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, this book identifies and explores the use of heritage throughout the world. Challenging the idea that heritage value is self-evident, and that things must be preserved, it demonstrates how it gives tangibility to the values that underpin different communities.

Examining international case studies including USA, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Laurajane Smith identifies and explores the use of heritage throughout the world. Challenging the idea that heritage value is self-evident, and that things must be preserved because they have an inherent importance, Smith forcefully demonstrates that heritage value is not inherent in physical objects or places, but rather that these objects and places are used to give tangibility to the values that underpin different communities and to assert and affirm these values. A practically grounded accessible examination of heritage as a cultural practice, "The Uses of Heritage" is global in its benefit to students and field professionals alike.

Introduction Part I The idea of heritage Chapter 1 The discourse of heritage Chapter 2 Heritage as cultural process Part 2 Authorised heritage Chapter 3 Authorising institutions of heritage Chapter 4 The 'manored' past: The banality of grandiloquence Chapter 5 Fellas, fossils and country -- the Riversleigh landscape Part 3 Responses to authorised heritage Chapter 6 Labour heritage: Performing and Remembering Chapter 7 The slate wiped clean? Labour heritage, memory and landscape in Castleford, West Yorkshire, England Chapter 8 'The issue is control': Indigenous politics and the discourse of heritage Conclusion