Counterheritage (Critical Perspectives on Heritage Conservation in Asia)

This book describes how the tenets of popular religion affect building and renovation practices and describes how modernist attempts to suppress popular religion in Asia in the early and mid-twentieth century impact religious heritage. Author Denis Byrne argues that the campaign by archaeologists and heritage professionals against the private collecting and looting of antiquities in Asia largely ignores the regimes of value which heritage discourse has helped erect and into which collectors and local diggers play. Focussing on the Philippines, Thailand, and Taiwan but also referencing China and other parts of Southeast Asia, richly detailed portraits are provided of the way people live with ‘old things’ and are affected by them. Narratives of the author’s fieldwork are woven into arguments built upon an extensive and penetrating reading of the historical and anthropological literature. The critical stance embodied in the title is balanced by the optimism of the book’s vision of a different practice of heritage, advocating a view of heritage objects as vibrant, agentic things enfolded in social practice rather than as inert and passive surfaces subject to conservation.