“New Life for Forgotten Things”: The Actualisation of the Heritage on the Romanov Side of Tutaev

Abstract

The article is devoted to modern practices of the heritage actualisation on the Romanov Side of the city of Tutaev (Russia, Yaroslavl region) and is based on a field research. The focus is on a specific aspect of actualisation — the practical inclusion of heritage in modern daily life, implying its use most often for its intended purpose. Based on the analysis of field material, the author describes an actualising approach (an alternative to the traditional interpretation of heritage as a preserved relic), but taking it not as a whole concept, but as a set of practices and techniques that allow “new life to be given to old things”, activating cultural resources not only in a tourist, but also in a socio-economic way. The relevance of this approach on Tutaev’s Romanov Side is due, according to the author, to a specific local context in which the residential environment has been actively reinterpreted as a cultural value: actualisation practices allow combining these two optics. The article offers a basic model of the actualisation process, and identifies two types of it for different categories of objects (those in the status of heritage and “forgotten” ones that have fallen out of use). It is noted that in both cases the actualised heritage has an ambivalent nature, balancing between “practicality” and “heredity”, a sign and a thing, a symbolic and a utilitarian function. In the article the author addresses the concepts of cultural recycling and semiotic status, demonstrating the limits of their applicability to this material. In conclusion, research questions are formulated and directions for further research are outlined.