Heritage as a Technology for the Production and Management of Indentities in Knowledge Societies

This paper aims to introduce cultural heritage as a tool oriented to the (re)construction of meaning and identities in contemporary society, which can be defi ned by the loss of the great social referents and the multiplication of precarious, fragmentary and contingent identities. It describes a social scenario where expert knowledge and postmodern political rationalities are capital is-sues for its understanding. In this scenario is set up, in an explicit way, an specifi c and easy to handle space by the expert: identity. Later, the text focuses on cultural heritage as a technology for the
production and management of identities, describing some of its forms of action.

Key words: heritage, identity, knowledge society, sociology of science, governmentality