World Heritage and the Ontological Turn: New Materialities and the Enactment of Collective Pasts

This edited collection explores the “thingness” of the ever-expanding range of things—buildings, sites, artifacts, environments, practices—that comprise the objects of World Heritage. A partial list of this heritage includes medieval castles, gothic cathedrals, baroque palaces, European wine regions, Buddhist temples, sacred mountains, boreal forests, botanical gardens, sacred groves, fire festivals, Arabic coffee, and Argentinian tango. What these diverse things share in common is their participation in a universal language promulgated by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee and its various international conventions and advisory bodies.¹ Moreover, this heritage language and related ways of classifying heritage—in terms of natural, cultural, intangible, or environmental criteria—are further instantiated at the national level through state heritage bureaucracies or “regimes” that implement and translate these UNESCO classifications on the ground (Bendix et al. 2012, Geismar 2015). Yet the fact that these translations often result in “frictions” or “dissonance” between state bureaucracies, international advisory bodies, local experts, and grassroots organizations suggest the existence of important disagreements about the things of heritage themselves (De Cesari 2012, Graham et al. 2000:24). While these things are often described by critics of heritage in matter of fact terms as the products of “falsification, petrification, desubstantiation, and enclosure,” ongoing disagreements suggest that such processes of reification fail to fully capture heritage as objects (Brumann 2009). Similarly, attempts to get at the root of these controversies by framing them in terms of debates about what counts as heritage, who owns it, and how it should be protected (Graham et al. 2000, Jacobs 2010) float on the surface, addressing heritage’s social context, rather than the things themselves. Moreover, attempts at describing the thingness of heritage in terms of national “substance” that historic buildings pass on from one generation to the next run further afield by assuming a direct unmediated relationship to the past, clouding the objects of heritage in mystification and obfuscation (Ashworth 2011, Alonso 1994, James 2012). Such explanations obscure the “heavy labor” required to transmit the past and establish its coherence as what passes for a “shared legacy” in the present, as well as the related use of the past to authorize the present (Collins 2015:31–32).

Even though heritage, then, is ultimately about things, scholars of heritage have paid surprisingly little attention to their nature. Even so-called “intangible heritage,” which deals with “immaterial” cultural practices, oral traditions, rituals, and crafts is shaped largely by its interactions with a variety of things. Part of this failure to grapple with the thingness of heritage stems from the nature-culture divide that resides at the heart of UNESCO’s 1972 World Heritage Convention and its successors. The 1972 Convention, in particular, defined heritage as either cultural or natural, with cultural heritage encompassing monuments, groups of buildings, and sites, and natural heritage comprising natural features, geological formations, and natural sites.² In response to protests from states in the Global South for a more representative World Heritage list (see Brumann this issue), UNESCO has introduced new categories of heritage since the ratification of the 1972 World Heritage Convention—particularly “cultural landscapes” (1993) for properties that demonstrate human interactions with the environment, and “intangible cultural heritage” (2003) for “practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills” and their associated “objects, artefacts, and cultural spaces.” Yet these new categories of heritage continue the legacy of the nature-culture split by defining “intangible” heritage (practices and traditions) in opposition to the “tangible” heritage (objects, buildings, places) with which it is associated, and by separating “cultural” from “natural” landscapes (Harrison 2013:137).

In keeping with this Cartesian split, analyses of heritage have largely focused on representation, discourse, and power, which remain largely human-centric in their concerns, while failing to fully engage with the artefacts of heritage. For instance, one of the more recent programmatic statements that launched the field of critical heritage studies treats heritage as a form of “authorized heritage discourse” (AHD) that arises from the “power/knowledge claims of technical and aesthetic experts” and that is “institutionalized in state cultural agencies and amenity societies” (Smith...