Cultural heritage refers to the traditions, values, beliefs, and sense of belonging in a community. It's the shared bond that helps shape our identity. It's the tangible and intangible both.
But cultural heritage as we know it today is not simply everything that we've inherited from the past. It is the result of a selection process—“a process of memory and oblivion that characterises every human society constantly engaged in choosing, for both cultural and political reasons, what is worthy of being preserved for future generations and what is not.”
The definition of “cultural heritage” is broad, and defining who it belongs to is equally tough given the fluidity of “cultural boundaries”. Think of the Mona Lisa—is it part of Italian or French national heritage or both?
