Contemporary cultural heritage conservation is increasingly shifting from object-oriented preservation toward human-centered management, yet its philosophical basis and operational implications remain underdeveloped. This article reinterprets that shift through a selective Marxian framework while also foregrounding Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD), collective memory, social memory, and community agency. On the basis of critical heritage studies, the article first conceptualizes cultural heritage as a historical product of human practice, a carrier of social relations, and a medium through which communities transmit memory. It then diagnoses three alienating effects produced by material-centered conservation: the ossification of practice, the reification of social relations, and the narrowing of human needs under technical rationality, authoritative discourse, and capital logic. In response, the article proposes a human-centered conservation framework organized around dynamic practice, ecological wholeness, integrated empowerment, and institutional safeguards. An in-depth case analysis of Xidi Village, China, further shows how festivals, ancestral hall rituals, adaptive reuse, knowledge sharing, and community governance can reconnect heritage with everyday life, collective identity, and social relation reproduction. The study contributes to heritage conservation theory by clarifying how material protection, community memory, and social relations can be integrated without reducing heritage to either static fabric or abstract theory.
Cheng et al. (Mon,) studied this question.