Cultural heritage is one of the concepts that have made an unusual career in the 20th century. The cultural codes associated with it – senses, meanings, and ideas, characteristic for specific local or national communities, and the tangible and intangible assets, became a space for new fascinations as well as scientific, regional, social and amateur exploration. These multiple searches for the truth showed that the essence of heritage is portrayed in the choice transforming the cultural goods into “our heritage.” The areas of culture, which are given axiological sense by individuals or communities, are usually protected and communicated to the next generations. There are various forms of communication – individual as well as collective oral tradition, institutional – public, private and non-governmental distinctive for organizations which select the phenomena and artefacts important from the point of view of their meanings. The texts included in the monograph present an enormous potential of the group of phenomena belonging to the tangible and intangible cultural heritage as well as its management. They also bring new findings and research perspectives, point to interesting meanings and associations, which are characteristic of this area of interdisciplinary research. By touching the local and universal as well as private and institutional, the authors show that the field of cultural heritage and its management can still offer a lot to explore...
Ewa Kocój, Introduction