Affording Authenticity and Strategies for Inclusive Heritage-making in a World Heritage Site - Irina Dobriță

A growing critical heritage scholarship interrogates the facets of socio-economic, cultural and even spatial exclusion involved in heritage-making and in preserving the integrity and authenticity – particularly of built heritage, historic monuments or cultural landscapes. In the case of a high-profile UNESCO site in rural Transylvania, most residents have limited (or dissonant) access to the cultural landscape they inhabit. However, this has not led to open contestation and residents have accepted to live with the official heritage enforced by a local minority – the very few remaining heirs of the Saxon settlers who built the village back in the thirteenth century. Locals even participate in the performing and production of the official narrative, as long as they are acknowledged, have a share in the gains of heritage commodifica ...