Heritage processes: rituals, spirits and pantheons

Abstract

In the first part of this study, I adopted the proposition, previously put forward by other scholars (see, for example, the Colloquium Chastel 1990), that there is a correlation between heritage and the sacred. I then examined the similarities between the processes of patrimonialisation and sacralisation. This idea led me to examine Chastel's analysis of the sacrificial nature of patrimonialisation, accepting its presuppositions (relationship to the sacred, consecration ritual) but challenging the idea that sacrificial objects are the costs of heritage conservation. In this first part, I have shown that the sacrificial object can only be the heritage object itself, while at the same time trying to demonstrate that the famous Denkmalkultus (Riegl) is not a cult of the monument, but a cult of memory to which the monument is consecrated. The monument thus appears in the cult of the monument as an object of mediation between society (and its privileged agents in charge of the cult) and the extra-natural entities to which the sacrifice is addressed. As a first approximation, and to evoke P. Nora's expression (“lieux de mémoire”), I have called these entities the “gods of memory”.