Abstract
Cultural heritage seems to be everywhere. But how do we define a concept that can include so many various things? This thesis investigates how the concept of cultural heritage is used in the Swedish government bill 2016/17:116 «Cultural heritage policy», which was voted through the parliament in 2017. This is the first time that the Swedish government treats cultural heritage as a separate political field. This means that the concept must be defined both as to what it means and includes, but also what role and use cultural heritage has in Swedish society today. In the bill the government chooses to use a more open definition of the concept than previously, and states that cultural heritage is traces of the past that people choose to value in the present. They also say that cultural heritage is not fixed but always changing due to this definition. The bill describes all the areas in society where the government argues that cultural heritage has a value, with the overall view of that heritage as a resource. I have chosen to approach the bill by using Laclau & Mouffe’s discourse theory. This perspective helps to sort the articulations made about the values and functions connected to cultural heritage in the text. In my analysis I show that the value of cultural heritage has different chains of equivalence and different key concepts attached to it depending on what functions of cultural heritage the government discusses. My analysis shows that by using such a wide and loose definition of the concept, the Swedish government is trying to include a very wide range of things and uses under the ‘umbrella’ of cultural heritage. I argue that in this bill there are several cultural heritage discourses which are not compatible with each other on the basis of the government’s articulations. Furthermore that they are not possible to combine, given the definition of cultural heritage, with the idea of a unified cultural heritage policy, which is what the government proposes. I also show that the use of the concept of cultural heritage and its definition is not consistent throughout the text.