Anthropology of cultural heritage is an academic discipline that describes and analyzes people’s practices concerning their cultural heritage, not heritage itself. Behind the advocacy of this discipline there is the expanding concept of cultural heritage since 1990.
Prior to the 1990s, typical cultural heritage was what people referred to as monuments, such as buildings and archeological sites. This idea reflects European and Christian values which take roots in the late 19th and 20th centuries which was the age of European nationalism formation. The World Heritage Convention adopted in UNESCO’s general assembly is no exception. When the Cold War ended in the 1990s and the culture became focused on in international politics, UNESCO attempted to organize international cooperation through World Heritage Sites, but instead it was criticized of its Eurocentric biases.
Faced with unexpected criticisms, UNESCO took two major steps. One was to launch a Global Strategy in 1994 to find new types of heritage in non-European countries, to diversify the concept of World Heritage, and thereby to correct Western biases towards cultural heritage. As a result, UNESCO recognized new types of heritage categories such as cultural landscapes, first defined in 1992, and buildings that people still use as living heritage. In conjunction with this, UNESCO encouraged participation of local communities such as neighboring people in order to flexibly manage, as cultural heritage, as everyday matters which modern people’s maintain and develop.
Another step taken by UNESCO is to implement a cultural heritage policy that is completely different from World Heritage which emphasizes outstanding universal values. The Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage, adopted by the UNESCO General Assembly in 2003, states that the value of each cultural heritage is not determined by the global society but by the people who support it. UNESCO has adopted a policy of treating everyday matters as a cultural heritage under the Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage.
Concept of cultural heritage is shifting its stress from things to people, or to people's practices. In order to preserve things, cooperation of those who support them has become indispensable, and it is also a necessary idea of maintaining people’s activities as cultural heritage. For this maintenance of practices across generations, basic research on people’s society and culture is indispensable. Anthropology of cultural heritage actively focuses on those issues that conventional cultural heritage studies kept outside the scope.