What to save and why : identity, authenticity, and the ethics of conservation /
Remember our friends at Engineered Labs? They were the ones whose viral TikTok of the apparent smashing of Indus Valley terra cotta elicited outrage for its casual and disrespectful attitude towards the care of south Asian material heritage (even though the pottery in the video turned out to be fake...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York :
Oxford University Press,
[2024].
|
| Subjects: |
| Summary: | Remember our friends at Engineered Labs? They were the ones whose viral TikTok of the apparent smashing of Indus Valley terra cotta elicited outrage for its casual and disrespectful attitude towards the care of south Asian material heritage (even though the pottery in the video turned out to be fake). Another reason that the video caused such a furor is that Engineered Labs sells a product that they call the "Heritage Personal Museum," a collection of fragments from 33 historical artifacts, cast in acrylic, from "Pompeii Ash" to "Dinosaur egg shells." Considering this alongside the video, it looked like the company was deliberately breaking items in order to divide them up and sell them. A representative of the company insists this is not the case, and I have no way of verifying whether the items in the "Heritage Personal Museum" are any more authentic than the Indus Valley terra cotta replica. But the product does nicely capture an important aspect of common thinking about heritage that in turn plays a key role in conservation-the idea that there are important parts of a common human heritage that anyone might be interested in, and therefore anyone might justifiably possess. To say that our heritage is held in common is to say, on this view, that we all have a claim to it. The "Heritage Personal Museum" is just the "Encyclopedic Universal Museum" (the museum that aspires to collect representative samples of artifacts from all times and places) writ small. |
|---|---|
| Physical Description: | x, 224 pages ; 19 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780197744550 0197744559 |