Denis Byrne is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney, Australia. He has worked in both the government and academic spheres of heritage conservation and has been a leading contributor to critical debates on heritage issues in Southeast Asia and indigenous Australia. He is co-editor (with Sue O’Connor and Sally Brockwell) of Transcending the Culture-Nature Divide in Cultural Heritage (2013) and author of Surface Collection: Archaeological Travels in Southeast Asia (2007).
An elegant and original exploration of heritage in Asia, Counterheritage effortlessly weaves together ethnography, travelogue and critical insight into the practices of heritage to show how the 'objects' of conservation are not passive or inert, but rather vibrant and efficacious 'things' which are intimately involved in people's everyday lifeworlds. Counterheritage provides crucial insights into the ways in which alternative models to those which are regularly deployed by 'global' heritage management agencies are at play in Asia, and their implications for local understandings of heritage and place. But perhaps more importantly, this engagingly written and ultimately optimistic ethnography of heritage provides an exciting new model for the critical exploration of heritage value, alongside an argument for its relevance in the contemporary world. - Rodney Harrison, University College London, UK