But What Are We Really Talking About? From Patrimoine to Heritage, a Few Avenues for Reflection

Abstract

This article proposes a history of the ideas of heritage founded on the differentiation between the concepts of heritage and patrimoine according to the two official languages in which they are approached and considered in Canada: that is, English and French. To do this, the author examines a varied corpus of published and unpublished historic and contemporary documents in order to determine the paradigms, the significance, and the practices that underlie the articulation and usage of the words heritage, patrimoine, and a few of their equivalents, according to their respective eras. In particular, by distinguishing patrimoine from heritage, we can also observe a metalanguage that opposes the institution and the status(es) that it confers to the community and its organic participation, which permits the assimilation of patrimoine, in French, to an ideological apparatus and to a social order, exclusive by definition, then observe the propagation of the meaning and its practices carried by the word patrimoine in French beyond the boundaries of language and into those that we now associate with heritage in English. After having identified the manifestations of this metalanguage in francophone and anglophone epistemologies of heritage studies and critical heritage studies, the author retraces several examples in the diverse regions of Canada, which permits a contrast between the parameters that define the concepts of heritage and patrimoine through what is (to be) common or what is (to be) transmitted, and whether the target is more focused on propriety or on usage. Finally, this “thick description” of the metalanguages of patrimoine and heritage allow us to discern what we could categorize as Canadian hybrids, born of the proximity of ideas of heritage and patrimoine on this territory, and to propose that in-depth intellectual inquiries might seize upon them to contribute to the resolution of theoretical and epistemological issues that the actions of public powers on heritage and patrimoine raise in the contemporary world.