The Heritage Syndrome and Commemorative Society

Today, it is as if truth and authenticity were buried in the past or in some distant place; they are seldom thought of as part of the here and now. Real life and authentic values only seem accessible by means of our ­fascination with the past (a past that is more comprised of our own ­history and that of our ancestors than of the history of foreign ­civilizations) and by means of exoticism (which relates to our archetypes of what constitutes a noble savage and not to the figure of the ­foreigner). For behind the experience of estrangement which most tourists seek lurks a stereotypical and exotic fantasy in which people hope to find authenticity in the words and gestures of the elders or the natives of a given land. The tourism industry, which is necessarily cultural, strives to ensure that native peoples conform to standard representations. The tourist gaze is well fed in clichés and fantasies—those regarding the life of our ancestors or a life close to nature—and partakes in what I call the heritage syndrome, which is a syndrome that signals the ­museification and aestheticization of the world in general and of our individual lifeworlds in particular. I contend that tourism represents a tendency in modern humans—in homo touristicus—to become tourists in their own culture, visitors of their own memory, spectators of their own existence.

The first measures to preserve heritage were taken, by official decree and in great haste, under the French Revolution, with the aim to protect and preserve the monuments, treasures and collections that had belonged to the Ancien Régime’s nobility and clergy at a time when such objects were menaced by the iconoclastic zeal of those whom the Abbé Grégoire called Vandals (hence the concept of vandalism). Today, the act of ­preserving heritage has become a categorical imperative that is a function of a duty to remember; it is, moreover, an administrative undertaking with considerable economic and political stakes whose meaning has changed radically. As a result, one sometimes entertains the troubling thought of whether we are still capable of imagining a future or living in the ­present without glancing into the rear-view mirror of history or recognizing ­ourselves in the memory of museums.