Heritage and Globalisation

Sophia Labadi, Colin Long, Sophia Labadi, Colin Long

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415571128
• eBook ISBN: 9781136965265
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume analyzes the politics, policy and practice of cultural heritage at the global level, identifying the major directions in which international heritage practice is moving, and exploring the key issues likely to shape the cultural heritage field well into the twenty-first century. It examines the tensions between the universal claims of much heritage practice, particularly that associated with the World Heritage system, and national and local perspectives. It explores the international legal framework developed since World War Two to protect heritage, particularly at times of war, and from theft, showing how contemporary global problems of conflict and illicit trade continue to challenge the international legal system.

Heritage and Globalisation critiques the incorporation of heritage in the world economy through the policies of international development organisations and the global tourism trade. It also approaches heritage from seldom-considered perspectives, as a form of aid, as a development paradigm, and as a form of sustainable practice.

The book identifies some of the most pressing issues likely to face the heritage industry at a global level in coming decades, including the threat posed by climate change and the need for poverty reduction. Providing a historically and theoretically rigorous approach to heritage as a form of and manifestation of globalisation, the volume's emphasis is on contemporary issues and new fields for heritage practice.

Part I
Global and local tensions

Chapter 1
The magic list of global status

UNESCO, World Heritage and the agendas of states

Marc Askew

The fate of good intentions: UNESCO, nation-states and the globalising of heritage

In a world populated by global signifiers, paradigms and buzz words, ‘heritage’ (with locally equivalent terms in non-English-speaking countries) stands out as conspicuous in its normative resonance, particularly when linked to the expressions ‘cultural heritage’, ‘natural heritage’ or ‘world heritage’. These terms stand for an array of normative as well as commercialised values attaching to the preservation, restoration and display of history, culture and nature. For various purposes, heritage in its multifarious guises is endorsed simultaneously by a global bureaucratic apparatus (the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, UNESCO), a global tourist industry, and national governments. In the 1960s and 1970s ‘heritage’ was the catchcry for strident campaigns to save the endangered material and natural world from depredation, culminating at the global level in UNESCO’s adoption of the World Heritage Convention in 1972. As David Lowenthal (1998) has evocatively shown, the contemporary cult of heritage was a result of the successes of these movements, and the term is fully institutionalised and commercialised as a condensed label for the valorised past – or, as one critic has defined it: ‘a mode of cultural production that gives the endangered or outmoded a second life as an exhibition of itself’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2006: 168). Such is the iconic status of the heritage trope that although ‘heritage’ and its associated assumptions have been subject to continued interrogation and refinement, most professionals and academics who critique its application and definitions ultimately rely on the term, whether because there is no adequate alternative, or because they have a key stake in the term’s preservation as a carrier for their own alternative models (see, e.g., Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996; Smith 2006).

Although UNESCO was neither the originator nor sole custodian of the leitmotif ‘heritage’ and its associated ideas, none could dispute that it is today the indisputable global-level instrument which mobilises resources, reproduces dominant arguments and rationales, establishes program agendas and policies, and dispenses status surrounding the conservation and preservation of the thing called ‘heritage’. For at least a decade UNESCO’s leadership, assemblies and associated organisations have pronounced that its expanding cultural programs aim towards mitigating the destructive effects of ‘globalisation’, particularly the cultural globalisation represented by the commodifying and homogenising culture industries of capitalism. The rhetoric of UNESCO’s key texts (its conventions and declarations) position the organisation outside the threatening globalising processes of the world (‘bad’ globalisation), but UNESCO itself is a prime expression of a countervailing form of beneficent (or ‘good’) globalisation, as expressed in its advocacy of world-wide protection of cultures and their valued tangible and ‘intangible’ past by means of protocols, declarations of universal principles and, most crucially, the compilation of inventories. Moreover, ‘World Heritage’, which UNESCO promotes and numerous cultural and tourism industries rely on, has emerged from the process of globalisation: ‘World Heritage, like world’s fairs and museums, are [sic] part of a world system, within which the world is to be convened, a world image projected, and a world economy activated’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2006: 163).

To many, stating that UNESCO is a global instrument may seem trite and unremarkable. The heritage movement that has become channelled and appropriated by UNESCO reflects a long history of internationalism, with its origins in late-eighteenth-century romanticism, enlightenment universalism, and a missionary zeal among intellectuals aiming for human betterment by cooperating across national boundaries. This was consolidated in the post-World War Two period by a widely shared determination to overcome the destructive forces of racism, exploitation and international strife, represented by the formation of the United Nations and its agencies, including UNESCO. It is thus understandable that UNESCO’s supporters are offended or perplexed when the institution’s programs are critiqued, since this implies a flaw in their undoubtedly good intentions for the world and the fuzzy but evocative founding rubric of UNESCO: ‘Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed’. My point here is that despite the laudable universalist ideals of many dedicated intellectuals and practitioners involved in UNESCO’s array of heritage conservation programs today, the globalised and institutionalised heritage system has not overcome nation-state-based power structures and nationalist agendas, but has rather enhanced them, and this severely compromises the ideal of forging a countervailing meta-national zeitgeist evoked by the term ‘World Heritage’. As Michael Herzfeld has recently remarked with specific reference to UNESCO and cultural heritage programs: ‘while global mobilization may in some respects be an attempt to supersede nationalism, it can also foment it’, a point made by other critics as well (Herzfeld 2008: 146). The most conspicuous recent example of this has been the nationalist-infused confrontation between Thailand and Cambodia, which exploded in early 2008 following the nomination of the Preah Vihear temple site to UNESCO’s World Heritage List.

This chapter addresses the influence of UNESCO’s global reach and functions, not by pointing to a Foucauldian-style dominance at the level of ‘discourses’ of heritage or the imposition of a world cultural regime, as some critics have done, but rather by drawing attention to the organisation’s authorising role in assigning ‘World Heritage’ as a status, one that is crystallised in the instrumental-symbolic function

Figure 1.1 Demonstrators of the People’s Alliance for Democracy demand the prosecution of the Thai cabinet for endorsing Cambodian nomination of Preah Vihear temple as a World Heritage site, July 2008 (Photo courtesy Bangkok Post)

of the World Heritage List and its generally unintended and uncontrollable consequences. UNESCO’sinfluence with respect to heritage signification lies far less in its institutional powers, which are relatively weak in formal legal terms. Thus, though the World Heritage Convention is nominally binding on member state signatories, the obligations on states concerning conservation do not override domestic laws or states’ sovereignty, and effectively amount to ‘non-binding political or moral ideals’ (Atherton and Atherton 1995: 637–38). UNESCO’s power in the sphere of heritage resides in the application of normative pressure and the harnessing of symbolic capital for a variety of constituencies, including professional bodies as well as (sometimes competing) elites in member states. Viewed from this more anthropological perspective, UNESCO’s principal function in the global and cultural arena, which it has been central in constructing, is to establish and perpetuate the technical and symbolic legitimacy of its ever-growing list of ‘World Heritage’ sites and, most recently, the so-called ‘Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity’, assembled in 2008. Simultaneously, these lists also act as status-conferring artefacts in the competition between nation states for global status and for their own internal purposes.

In this chapter I argue that one recent claim that the so-called ‘Authorized Heritage Discourse’ (for which UNESCO is the principal global-level purveyor) is

Figure 1.2 Cambodian soldiers patrolling at the Preah Vihear temple site as border tensions with Thailand escalate, July 2008 (Photo courtesy The Nation)

Eurocentric and crypto-imperialist is both redundant and a conceptual red herring: it misrecognises the real locus of power and exploitation in the global heritage game, which is the nation-state and not any dominant global institutional structure or discourse of heritage classification. My main point is that UNESCO’s World Cultural Heritage program is as much, and probably more, a creature of its member states and their agendas as it is an instrument of UNESCO’s specialists, intellectual apologists and affiliated professional bodies of conservation specialists. This state of affairs stems largely from the structure of the organisation and its treaty-style conventions, which mirror the parent UN body in making States Parties the key actors, thus leaving all key processes at a country level in the hands of national elites. That is not to say that the technical-normative and administrative systems presided over by UNESCO are not significant – they perform critical functions in allowing various actors to co-exist and maintain legitimacy through overseeing processes and authorising buzz words. However, they are not the key instrument that perpetuates marginalisation and dominance in the sphere of ideology and cultural symbolisation. I argue in this chapter that the World Heritage List (and other lists) has a simultaneous technical and normative function – that is, it both endorses technical processes of conservation, interpretation and management, and confers global recognition of sites. In the process UNESCO’s professionals and consultants who work in this field reproduce their own status, identity and legitimacy in the technical order of conservation work. We might describe core administrators and their intellectual buttresses (following Turner 2002) as ‘virtuous cosmopolitans’ on the world stage who perpetuate the necessary myth that the world can be united by universal respect and amity through promoting heritage conservation – epitomised in the central legal-normative affirmation of the World Heritage Convention that there is a ‘common heritage of mankind’ requiring protection and promotion (Turtinen 2000: 10). On the level of normative values, the internationalist goals of key UNESCO personnel and affiliates to promote unity in diversity are indeed worthy, but the reality is messier and driven by parochialism and pragmatism at the level of member states.

UNESCO’s member states use the nomination process and promotion of world heritage sites for their own domestic agendas of cultural hegemony and state nationalism (besides the well-recognised function of generating tourism income). It is this last mentioned process that exposes the most critical weakness in the global heritage system, highlighting the reality that nation-states have harnessed global systems more than been eclipsed by them. Certainly, many working in UNESCO’s conservation programs are aware of the contradictions between cosmopolitan ideals and nation-state-driven realities. The relentless competition for global cultural and political capital between nations on the world stage is conspicuously expressed in competitions for the Nobel Prize and over venues for the Olympic Games (Lovell 2006). It is also revealed in the uses of UNESCO’s World Heritage List and its new list of ‘intangible heritage’, where the thirst for the ‘global accolade’ among nation-states over the past decade has led to a veritable explosion of World Heritage listed sites (Smith 2002). This all suggests that Ulrich Beck’s hope that his favoured ‘new game’ of interacting trans-national networks may supersede the ‘old game’ of competing nation-states is a vain expectation (Beck 2005: 3–4). I highlight in a number of examples in this chapter that world heritage sites have various uses for nation-states, and UNESCO’s universalist project has been successfully appropriated for extremely pragmatic purposes. Despite this, the heritage system that is sustained by UNESCO persists because of the critical symbolic functions it serves for its key actors.

UNESCO and globalisation, the good and the bad

Perhaps one of the most remarkable characteristics of the rhetoric of UNESCO’s key texts and pronouncements is the strategic use of the contrasting value-laden terms ‘global’ and ‘globalisation’, central binary tropes against and through which these texts establish the legitimate goals of the organisation’s numerous programs. ‘Globalisation’ in popular usage is almost universally portrayed as a negative, invasive and destructive process, an accepted abbreviation for a demonic ‘[neo-liberal] globalisation’–the expansion of world capitalism at the expense of the weak nations of the South and their vulnerable peoples. Similarly, the use of the term in UNESCO’s pronouncements summons the frightening prospects of a new world order (or disorder) where formerly distinctive ways of life – rhetorically condensed in the rights-laden term ‘cultural diversity’–are no longer tenable. The texts of UNESCO’s leadership and supporters, like those of its parent body, the United Nations, distinguish the benevolent global scope of the organisation and its allied ‘international community’ from the threatening processes of...

Table of contents

• Key Issues in Cultural Heritage
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Series General Co-Editors’ Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Global and local tensions
• Part II Heritage, development and globalisation
• Part III The future of the past: twenty-first-century challenges
• Index