Anticipating loss, again

Central to the idea of heritage is the need for it to be protected, which suggests the question: What does it need to be protected from? How we answer this is critical to informing safeguarding strategies for heritage and ethical considerations. The relationship between heritage and perceived risk has a dense history. It is also a productive dialectic through which our understanding of heritage and the challenges we face as societies mutually inform and shape one another. Since sociologist Ulrich Beck theorised about ‘the risk society’, we have seen a growing crescendo in crisis reporting. Has the perception of an ever-larger number of risks spurred a growth in the number of heritages we feel need to be protected? Has it changed our appreciation of what counts as heritage? This chapter addresses these questions by exploring the social aspects of risk as they relate to heritage. To do so, it brings in research on risk from various disciplines to focus on notions of fragility, transmission and the implications for heritage ethics, including the consequences of ingrained ways of responding to perceived risks, often in scenarios marked by a sense of emergency and urgency. To conclude, this contribution will propose an alternative approach to making ethical decisions about heritage in relation to risk.