Disciplining Memory: Heritage Tourism and the Temporalisation of the Built Environment in Rural France

This article presents an ethnographic case study of the relationship between the development of heritage tourism, and the role of material culture in memory practices in rural Southern France. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in the village of Monadières, it provides an analysis of how artefacts in the locality’s built environment have been renovated and revalued in a climate of historical change. This was the consequence of varied acts of commemoration by both independent individuals and the local council in which heritage tourism development was not necessarily the end-goal. Nevertheless, these acts were implicated in the council’s ‘disciplinary programme’ to produce a local infrastructure for heritage tourism. The article therefore explores how this industry co-habits with and colonizes modern memory practices at a micro-level. To this end it adapts analytical tools from the anthropology of time, which enable an integrative analysis of these differing ‘temporalizations’ of the past.