Vortrag

Christoph Brumann:
One World Heritage? Culture, Nation and the North-South Divide in the UNESCO World Heritage Arena

The UNESCO World Heritage Convention of 1972 is one of the most widely ratified international treaties, and a place on the World Heritage List is a coveted mark of distinction that boosts tourism, investments, national and local pride and sometimes also conservation. The List is reserved for cultural and natural sites found to have "Outstanding Universal Value" (OUV), and how this is defined and diagnosed I pursued in ethnographic fieldwork at World Heritage Committee meetings, interviews with key participants and documentary study, conducted over a decade. In this period, it became significantly easier to acquire World Heritage titles, and conservation demands for the sites so honoured can now be ignored more openly. Preconditions for this transformation include the structural nation-centeredness of this UN-system body; loose and inconsistently applied heritage conceptions; and vulnerable procedures for evaluation, monitoring and decision-making that resort to a surprising degree of intuition and improvisation. The most important factor, however, were North-South imbalances in winning the titles, despite long-standing efforts to reconceptualise cultural heritage in a more globally inclusive way. When frustration peaked, influential countries of the Global South launched an informal rebellion against expert hegemony. Yet even now, Northern hegemony remains, in a close parallel to the stunted reform efforts of other UN bodies. Fundamental reform is obstructed by the single most unchallenged premise -- even with more than a thousand entries, the World Heritage List is considered incomplete, making the addition of one's own nation's sites the key objective for almost everyone present at the meetings. Ironically, the canonisation process of the Roman Catholic Church provides for the closest parallel, and I am therefore looking forward to presenting this research in the country with most World Heritage sites and most saints.

Christoph Brumann is Head of Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, and Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. He is the author of The Best We Share: Nation, Culture and World-Making in the UNESCO World Heritage Arena (2021) and Tradition, Democracy and the Townscape of Kyoto: Claiming a Right to the Past (2012) and has co-edited Monks, Money, and Morality: The Balancing Act of Contemporary Buddhism (2021) and World Heritage on the Ground: Ethnographic Perspectives (2016). His current group "Constructing Urban Futures in Asia" deals with the architects, planners and developers behind the building boom in the eastern half of Asia. He is a member of the Academia Europaea.

09. Juli 2024, 11:00 Uhr

This will be a hybrid event. Please register here for online participation.

Venue
Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai
Via dei Servi 51
50122 Firenze, Italia

 

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