58 museum and society, March 2007. 5(1) 58-64 © 2007, Dicks, Perry, Hughes, Butts. ISSN 1479-8360 Book reviews Laurajane Smith, The Uses of Heritage, London and New York: Routledge, 2006, paper, £17.99, pp. vii+351 ‘There is, really, no such thing as heritage’ (p. 11), Laurjane Smith declares in the opening sentence of her book. With this she outlines her main thesis: that heritage is not a thing with defined meanings and values, but an ‘inherently political and discordant’ practice that performs the cultural ‘work’ of the present. It can be utilized by different interest-groups and individuals for different purposes and with varying degrees of hegemony and legitimacy. It tells us more about the present, in other words, than the past. In a wide-ranging first chapter that traces the historical development of an ‘authorised heritage discourse’ (hereafter AHD), Smith observes that the uses of heritage are consequently often bound up with power relations, and specifically the power to legitimize and de-legitimize cultures. This is because powerful groups have been actively successful, over time, in defining what does and does not qualify as the nation’s heritage. Such hegemonic definitions promote the idea that heritage is about a common national inheritance, lineage and set of innate values; that it concerns a singular past that must not be tampered with (predicated on the Ruskinian ethos of ‘conserve as found’), that it is evidenced through monuments and tangible assets as opposed to other forms of expression, that visitors need to be led to it and instructed in it passively, and that it derives from a universal aesthetics of taste and value largely determined by expert rather than lay judgement. In seeing these assumptions as constituting a discourse, Smith is able to show how they establish powerful conceptual frameworks outside of which dissenting voices struggle to advance alternative conceptions. For example, the dominance of this discourse has resulted in the widely-held idea that conservation is about the preservation of selected and credentialized buildings and tends to exclude understandings of heritage that are not focused on material assets but on people’s attachments, identities or sense of belonging. The dominance of such a view is illustrated by the heritage critics, who vociferously attacked heritage in the 1980s, and who in the process mistook the AHD for heritage itself, defining their target in this narrow sense and hence tarring all heritage with one brush. Smith also points out that many of the gestures towards multiculturalism and minority history in museums today still leave unaltered the terms upon which heritage is defined, allotting subaltern groups a place in the authorized discourse, but not allowing alternative conceptions of what constitutes heritage to take hold. This echoes Coombes’s (1992) analysis of museum displays that celebrate cultural diversity under the ‘banner of multiculturalism’ but fail to explore the unequal relations of power that underpin it. As a result, subaltern cultures may only be exhibited as ‘scopic feast’ or ‘contented global village’ (ibid.). In Chapter 2, Smith outlines a conceptualization of heritage that seeks to move away from its persistent equation with sites, buildings, material objects and patrimony, and to understand it instead as a cultural process – an approach that concords with my own view of heritage as a form of communicative practice. It should be seen as a dynamic process, in which the past furnishes the resources for conflicts and disagreements about what should be valued and how. In recounting the lessons she learned participating in a heritage project with Waanyi women in northern Queensland, Australia, Smith advances the argument that the heritage dimension of the project was actually something living - located in the experiences and performances that the women made of the historical site; not the site itself. This means that heritage emerges as a relational idea: it is about how individuals and groups actively take up