Dianne Sachko Macleod, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects, American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800-1940

This collection of ten, wide-ranging essays explores various aspects of heritage, and more specifically, conundrums in heritage management in contemporary, culturally pluralist communities.With topics as diverse as street art and graffiti, social housing, monuments, seaside resorts and the Country House (capital letters mandatory!), this collection presents many thought-provoking and fresh concepts and approaches to heritage.Like the heritage field itself, the authors represent a range of academic disciplines, from archaeology and geography, to architecture and history, as well as contributions from heritage practitioners.From the creativity of these essays, one senses that many of these authors are boundary riders: testing the limits of their respective fields and taking what could be perceived as a backwards-looking field firmly into future territory.Emerging from a series of workshops and presentations as part of an inter-disciplinary research cluster organized by the editors of the book, central to this collection is an interrogation of what constitutes value.Rejecting any idea that value is intrinsic to places or objects, the editors state in their introduction, 'all of the authors contributing to this collection proceed on the basis that concepts of cultural, historical, or social value are culturally and historically constructed' (p.1).This instantly complicates previously-held concepts integral to heritage practice such as the primacy of place and the dominance of expert values in how conservation knowledge is defined.In setting these new co-ordinates for the heritage field, the introduction teases out its inherent paradoxes and constraints but also points to its potential to facilitate democratic dialogues about what matters to communities.Whilst heritage can operate for elitist values or self-interest on the part of communities seeking to protect property values in Britain for example, it can also assist Indigenous people in struggles of recognition and selfdetermination.In the introduction specific examples are used to both theorise and provide practical direction, which characterises this collection as a whole.Stonehenge is an apt example.The editors show how, as a place whose 'enigmatic nature has made it prone, and suitable, to multiple interpretations' (p.5), Stonehenge and its meanings have been subject to ongoing contestation, resulting in regimes of control and exclusion of competing, usually nonconformist, values.Stonehenge reinforces 'the cultural and historical specificity of heritage' (p.4), already highlighted as one of the book's recurring themes, which is explored in the essays through a multitude of cases and contexts.The first grouping of essays 'Values and Heritage Stewardship' opens with David Lowenthal's impassioned Patrons, Populists, Apologists: Crises in Museum Stewardship.This broad sweep of issues currently confronting museums is probably the essay with most appeal to those in the museum field, although many may quibble with the author's characterization of museums that identify as agents for social change as 'avowedly didactic, partisan, chauvinistic' (p.25).Many contemporary museum truisms are questioned in this dense account of crisis and dilemma.Indeed, strategies that are identified elsewhere in the book as positive in regards to dealing with pluralism are tightly questioned here.Close probing continues with Laurajane Smith's Deference and Humility: The Social Values of the Country House and Peter Howard's Historic Landscapes and the Recent Past: Whose History?, two essays that scrutinise elitism, class and expertise and the very real political and social ramifications of these in heritage practice.Part Two explores cultural landscapes, a term used consciously to highlight everyday, overlooked and therefore potentially undervalued places and objects.Both Lisanne Gibson and museum and society, 7(3)

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