Avoiding the pitfalls of both the reverential approach of ‘heritage belief’ and the overly critical one of ‘heritage atheism’, ‘heritage agnosticism’ is proposed as a theoretical middle path for the burgeoning field of heritage studies. The cases of Kyoto and the UNESCO World Heritage arena demonstrate the limits of a purely deconstructive analysis. The popular demand for historical veracity and authenticity, lay historicities, the ethnographic study of heritage institutions, and personal attachments to heritage are research topics that will benefit from heritage agnosticism, particularly if it accounts for the full variety of both professional and lay positions and voices.

A B S T R A C TRecent anthropological and other literature tends to assume that the uses of heritage in modern societies lead to the falsification, petrification, desubstantiation, and enclosure of the things and practices so designated. Yet two traditions of Japan's ancient capital Kyoto-the historic town houses (kyô-machiya) that have found a new appreciation since the 1990s and the Gion matsuri, one of the most famous festivals of the nation-contradict these assumptions. Their well-documented histories are not widely distorted; they are not forever fixed but allowed to evolve; they are valued not only for their traditionality but also for other, substantive qualities; and their appreciation is not dominated by a concern for social boundaries. This is influenced by the urban, relatively sophisticated and cosmopolitan background of both traditions, as it is in parallel cases elsewhere. Greater attention to the perspectives of their carriers, however, will very likely show that the social uses of other traditions too are more complex than the standard assumptions lead one to believe. [Japan, cultural heritage, invention of tradition, vernacular architecture, festivals, urban anthropology] Four assumptions about the modern-day use of cultural heritage stand out. In simple and not-too-positivesounding terms, marking out things and practices as heritage leads to their falsification, petrification, desubstantiation, and enclosure.

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