The one-sentence truth: Heritage is not simply the past preserved; it is the present deciding which parts of the past deserve to remain visible.
Core vocabulary
Heritage, collective memory, preservation, commemoration, interpretation, authenticity, legacy, historical revision, contested memory, cultural continuity.
History versus memory
History aims to investigate the past through evidence; collective memory concerns how communities remember and narrate it. The two can overlap but need not be identical.
Preservation
Preservation has opportunity costs. Buildings, landscapes and traditions compete with development, housing and changing social needs. Evaluation requires criteria.
Authenticity
Authenticity can refer to original material, faithful practice or meaningful continuity. Restored heritage can be authentic in one sense and reconstructed in another.
Contested memory
Public monuments and commemorations can become contested when groups assign different meanings to the same past. Removing, retaining or reframing them each carries symbolic consequences.
Example sentence
“Heritage preservation is most socially valuable when it sustains meaningful historical understanding rather than merely freezing aesthetically attractive fragments of the past.”
Singapore application
Use built heritage, museums, neighbourhoods, language and commemoration to analyse development against continuity, while asking whose history is preserved and how it is interpreted.
Continue the JC2 GP vocabulary system
Return to General Paper Vocabulary Year 2 (JC2) and Vocabulary for Junior College (JC1–JC2).
Final thought
The past cannot be preserved whole. Heritage begins with the choices made about what remains.