Heritage, Place and Community

(Paperback)

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Description

The Rhondda Heritage Park is the only colliery building left in a valley which at one time supported sixty-six deep mines. As the only significant public memorial the Rhondda has to its mining industry, it demonstrates the potential of heritage to offer a thought-provoking and accessible representation of local identity and community. However, critics of heritage point out its pretensions, banalities and failures, and its tainted, entrepreneurial character. In Heritage, Place and Community, Bella Dicks explores these contradictions in the concept and practice of heritage, shows how heritage has come to be adopted as an attempt to regenerate the cultural and economic identity of former industrial areas and discusses the role of heritage in the formation and negotiation of social identity. This ground-breaking book is more than just a study of the development of the Rhondda Heritage Park. Using an innovative theoretical framework, Heritage, Place and Community brings together the economic, cultural, social and political dimensions of heritage production and consumption and seeks to trace the ways in which the study of heritage opens up wider questions of representation and politics.

Reviews

' ... I expect that it will become required reading for final year and postgraduate heritage management (and tourism) students, as well as the tourism research community. Thoughtful practitioners will also find much here to stimulate reflection ... The text is scholarly, written carefully and well organised throughout. Its apparent simplicity of structure and coherence belies the careful planning and meticulous research that much have informed its development.' (Tourism Management) '...this book makes interesting reading and...is very competitively priced.' New Heritage

Author Bio

Bella Dicks is a Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University. She is the author of several articles dealing with the relationships between heritage, community and identity.