Beyond Transmission

This article proposes heritage as care as a theoretical framework for understanding how cultural heritage persists under conditions of demographic aging, livelihood decline, and post-transmission precarity. While existing heritage studies have emphasized management, safeguarding, and participation, they remain limited in explaining how heritage is sustained when transmission has weakened and institutional support is insufficient. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research on ‘haenyeo’ (female divers) in island communities of South Korea, this study shifts analytical attention from heritage designation to everyday practices of endurance. It argues that haenyeo heritage survives not primarily through formal safeguarding measures, but through continuous acts of care—embodied, relational, and unevenly distributed labor largely borne by aging women. By conceptualizing heritage as care, the article foregrounds the ethical, temporal, and affective dimensions of heritage continuity that are obscured by management-oriented paradigms. Empirically, the haenyeo case illustrates a post-transmission condition in which heritage persists beyond reproduction through sustained caregiving practices. Theoretically, the article contributes to heritage scholarship by reframing cultural heritage as a process of care rather than an object of management, and by positioning East Asian island contexts as critical sites for theory production rather than peripheral applications of Eurocentric heritage models

Cognitive reframing · Cultural heritage · Cultural heritage management · Ethnography · Industrial heritage · Safeguarding · Scholarship · Values · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · Cultural Identity and Heritage · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration