As part of the ILC symposium New Directions for Research in Language and Culture on 6 November 2013 Professor Marion Demossier, Modern Languages, will be giving her inaugural lecture ‘Changing Places.  The taste of Heritage in Burgundy’.

The lecture will be chaired by Professor Ullrich Kockel, Heriot Watt University Edinburgh

‘Changing Places.  The taste of Heritage in Burgundy’

Anthropologists have long been fascinated by the concepts of place and community and attention has recently shifted to the supposed erosion of the ‘natural’ connection between place and culture in a globalised world. In this talk, I discuss how in France long-standing local, regional and state efforts to conserve emblematic ‘objects’ or ‘places’ have taken on a new twist as local elites seek to bypass the conventions governing UNESCO definitions of heritage to suit their own political and economic purposes. By focusing on Burgundy and its recent application for world heritage status, I discuss the ways in which local heritage is reinvented on a global scale.

Each of the Inaugural Lectures in Humanities will have an end of lecture collection for the speaker’s nominated charity.  For this lecture Professor Demossier has chosen to support War Child.