Beyond classification: rethinking heritage through dialogical reproduction

Abstract

This paper rethinks the epistemological foundations of heritage by advancing the concept of dialogical reproduction, a performative model that explains how cultural value endures through acts of response, reinterpretation, and renewal. Global heritage governance, shaped by Enlightenment binaries and codified in UNESCO conventions, divides culture into tangible, intangible, and documentary domains; yet such classifications obscure the relational and processual nature of cultural life. Building on relational ontology and entanglement theory, the study argues that heritage persists not through preservation but through performance: practices that continually make and remake relations among people, practices, and places. Drawing on the longue durée of the Orchid Pavilion Gathering (Lanting), a fourth-century Chinese ritual-literary event re-created through calligraphy, ritual, and place-making, the paper traces how copying, reconstruction, and re-enactment function as dialogical processes that sustain meaning across time. Integrating insights from performance studies and anthropology, it proposes dialogical reproduction as a framework for rethinking heritage as a practice of responsiveness: an ongoing conversation between past and present, material and human, continuity and change. In doing so, the paper offers an alternative to classificatory and possessive heritage regimes, highlighting how governance can recognise cultural continuity as relational, iterative, and historically situated.