Landscapes of Difficult Heritage / Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict (PDF)

"Wollentz's study is very impressive in its intellectual breadth and depth, combining acute insights in the theory of heritage and memory with detailed empirical observations derived from heritage ethnographies in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Sweden."

This book studies how people negotiate difficult heritage within their everyday lives, focusing on memory, belonging, and identity. The starting point for the examination is that temporalities lie at the core of understanding this negotiation and that the connection between temporalities and difficult heritage remains poorly understood and theorized in previous research. In order to fully explore the temporalities of difficult heritage, the book investigates places in which the incidents of violence occurred in different time periods. It examines one example of modern violence (Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina), one example of where the associated incident occurred during medieval times (the Gazimestan monument in Kosovo), and one example of prehistoric violence (Sandby borg in Sweden). The book presents new theoretical perspectives and provides suggestions for developing sites of difficult heritage, and will thus be relevant for academic researchers, students, and heritage professionals.

Gustav Wollentz defended his PhD in the summer of 2018 at the Graduate School of Human Development in Landscapes, Kiel University, Germany. He received his Bachelor's and his Master's degrees in Archaeology from Linnaeus University in Sweden. In 2018 and in 2019, he was hired within the AHRC-funded Heritage Futures research programme to co-author a chapter on "toxic heritage". He is currently working as a project leader / researcher at the Nordic Centre of Heritage Learning and Creativity, in Östersund, Sweden.