Innovation, Habitus, and Heritage: Modeling the Careers of Cultural Forms Through Time

Abstract

Since the 1990s, folklorists have become more deliberate in their use of the concept of heritage, with the term now standing at the center of our theoretical and policy debates. Heritage is both a phenomenon in the world that folklorists think about and a concept that we think with. In this article we build on classic and recent work, presenting an ideal type model of heritage that locates it within the flow of time and in relationship to other modes of culture—particularly innovation and normative culture or, in a somewhat different framework, habitus. The heuristic offered emphasizes the different degrees of metacultural salience characteristic of a cultural form in a particular social, cultural, and historical context and aims to supplement critical perspectives that are particularly focused on formal heritage policies.