Sunday, June 11, 2006
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.
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2 comments:
cik naz,1st of all,this is a good topic to discuss on it..i love the idea of conservation,heritage,culture and tradition...and i was thinking bout what's the differences between heritage building,cultural building, and traditional building??how to define them??and how the heritage formed the ritual & spiritual of community??
The words 'heritage', 'culture' and 'traditional' are best to be understood when you analyse a Malay kampung house for example (or a Chinese temple or shophouse).
The issue here could be "when was the building built?" However the argument could be; does not matter when as long as the traditional principles are applied with discipline and close to the authentic.
Is it 'traditional'? Next inquiry - Was it conceived (conceptually engaged) by using principles of design from the craftsman / house builder that learned and transmit his work from a disciplined set of work ethics and production processes? If 'yes' and you see the product shows that, then 'yes' that is traditional. Regardless of whether it was built yesterday.
Is it 'cultural'? Which culture, you may ask? Malay? There are so many root cultures from Malay, ie Rawa, Jawa, Minang, Mandailing...so which one. When one finally decides than the topic of culture can be engaged.
Is it 'heritage'? 'Heritage' is a generic word to describe every bit of human endeavour that is shown in a historical perspective. People would argue based on legislative definition, ie the Heritage Act and so on.
Yeah, there are lots to discuss, because when we start talking about it, more questions appear...
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