The Heritage Model: The Emergence of Cultural Heritage in Advanced Modernity

This article seeks to approach the historic dimension of cultural heritage, posing the question about its origin: a postmodern reality that echoes in previous sensibilities, practices, apparatuses and institutions of what we know today as heritage. After placing the origin of cultural heritage in the second half of the 20th century - and being consolidated as a social reality in the last three decades, I will describe the mechanisms by which several social theorists have traditionally applied the concept beyond its own socio-historic genesis. Finally, I will explore the idea of the heritage model as a notion that helps us to understand why the logic of heritage extends retrospectively to earlier practices and realities: cultural heritage becomes the generic model used to identify all kinds of conservative actions.