Cultural Heritage versus Living Culture

Detailed chapter description

Chapter 141 examines the tension between cultural heritage and living culture. The tension is real, but the opposition is often misleading. Heritage is not simply the old part of culture preserved from change, while living culture is not simply the new part left outside museums. Heritage is a process of selection, documentation, recognition and transmission through which some practices, objects, places and memories are made publicly valuable. Living culture is the continuing activity through which people speak, sing, paint, worship, cook, marry, make objects, remember places and reinterpret inherited forms. The historical problem arises when heritage institutions treat a living practice as if its most authentic form were a fixed photograph of the past. The contemporary Mithila–Vajji–Anga region makes this problem especially visible. Mithila painting is simultaneously household practice, professional art, intellectual property, tourist image and global commodity. Chhath is simultaneously family ritual, public infrastructure problem, environmental event and diasporic marker. Tirhuta/Mithilakshar is simultaneously manuscript heritage, identity symbol and a script being re-enabled through digital technology. Panji manuscripts are archives, but the genealogical system from which they emerged has also been a social institution with changing authority. In Anga, Manjusha painting and Bhagalpur silk likewise show that a cultural form survives through makers, markets and reinterpretation rather than by remaining unchanged. The chapter therefore asks not whether culture should be preserved or modernised, but what kinds of safeguarding allow communities to continue making culture on their own changing terms.