
Space and Heritage
On the Generativity of Environing Worlds
In his manuscript fragments on perception, the philosopher Edmund Husserl would speak of a certain thickening of temporal experience as an acquisition, that is, as a kind of “heritage” (Erbe) that takes the form of embodied habitus that is inherent to the lived experience of space. This special issue of Future Anterior takes this phenomenological insight as a guiding clue, and inquires into the relation of this intimate sense of heritage as the embodied becoming of the subject, to some of its wider, more normative and critical senses in heritage studies. This issue is dedicated to the theme of heritage, viewed in terms of its implicit sense as a mode of lived experience that is embodied, and in this way, spatial. Approaching the question of heritage from this perspective can contribute to wider critical examinations of the concept of heritage, such as those explored in the recently published volume, Heritage Futures, that contains rich and multidisciplinary comparative research on cultural and natural heritage practices (Harrison et. al. 2020). In suggesting that heritage is a mode of lived experience, the issue emphasizes questions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in exploring the meaning of heritage; and in proposing that such experience is spatial, it foregrounds questions of embodiment and lived-bodily experience. This turn to questions of embodied spatiality and intersubjectivity is also a “generative” turn, which functions to open certain possibilities for critique and renewal of the theme of heritage that this special issue wishes to explore.
