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Good-bye to all that: COVID-19 and the transformations of cultural heritage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2021

Neil Asher Silberman
Neil Asher Silberman*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts Amherst; Coherit Associates, Branford, CT, United States Email: nasilber@anthro.umass.edu
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Abstract

Economists, political scientists, and journalists around the world have suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic will have long-term effects on twenty-first-century global society. As a precipitating factor in the final collapse of the post-1945 world order, the pandemic has been seen as an epochal turning point in human history. This article will examine the long-term effects that the pandemic may have on the protection and promotion of cultural heritage, which has become a major economic and political undertaking in the post-World War II era, with earlier roots in elite aesthetics and the rise of mass tourism in the nineteenth century. This article will identify some dramatic changes in economic activity and politics that may transform the social role of cultural heritage in the coming decades.

Keywords

Cultural HeritageCOVIDcultural economicstourismpublic engagementculture change
Type
Article
Information
International Journal of Cultural Property , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 467 - 475
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International Cultural Property Society

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