From the few to the many: re-possession and the heritage moment

Critical analyses across the humanities and social sciences have found heritage processes to be drivers of dispossession, taking benefits and rights from the original creators and carriers and giving them to usually smaller circles of elites, professional experts and other outsiders.While this often applies, heritage recognition inevitably also requires the opposite move, taking from the few and giving to the many in acts of collective (re-)possession.Heritage items thus acquire a co-owner, at least for some of their uses.I illustrate this with heritage-listed houses in Leipzig, a seized Picasso painting and heritage destruction for artistic purposes.I then argue that the World Heritage Convention reproduces coownership on the next higher level, between the nation state and humanity, with sometimes significant consequences (Cologne Cathedral, Venice, the ICC court case on Timbuktu).By contrast, the controversy about 'universal museums' demonstrates the limits of evoking global ownership only rhetorically.Chichn Itz illustrates the significance of public possession even when practical consequences are negligible.Heritage studies stand to gain from greater attention to how the different modes of (re-)possession intertwine, or even feed on each other, and from precision as to what exactly is being (dis-)possessed in connection with heritage status.