The Meaning of Heritage

I had begun to ask questions about the meaning of 'heritage'. Even though , my PhD thesis concentrated on examples from England and Wales, my queries evidently forced me to ask about my own heritage. I believe that the love of heritage is differently felt in the East compared to the West. If confined to just buildings, like this quote from UK's Town & Country Planning book, "'Heritage' is the fashionable word for the national inheritance of historic buildings..." (Cullingworth, Nadin 1997), then it would arguably be a Western perspective. 'Heritage' is a difficult word to pin down on its own. You needed to use the word 'tradition' and / or 'culture', in order to give it some base for discussion. By only referring to historic buildings, the argument for heritage would be lost in the Malaysian context, for example. We shall discuss this more later.