- The Oxford Handbook of Public Heritage Theory and Practice
- About the Editors
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Public Heritage as Social Practice
- Creating Universal Value: The UNESCO World Heritage Convention in Its Fifth Decade
- The Suffocated Cultural Heritage of Sub-Saharan Africa’s Protected Areas
- Sustainable Conservation of Urban Heritage: The Contribution of Governance-Focused Studies
- Heritage and the Politics of Cooperation
- Culture, Heritage, and the Politics of Becoming
- Problematizing the Idea of Heritage Management
- Heritage and Management, Professional Utopianism, Administrative Naiveté, and Organizational Uncertainty at the Shipwrecks of Pisa
- Accounting for What We Treasure: Economic Valuation of Public Heritage
- Cultural Heritage: Capital, Commons, and Heritages
- Heritage as Remaking: Locating Heritage in the Contemporary World
- Culturally Reflexive Stewardship: Conserving Ways of Life
- Neoliberalism and the Equivocations of Empire
- Public Heritage and the Promise of the Digital
- On the Need for a Nuanced Understanding of “Community” in Heritage Policy and Practice
- “What Could Be More Reasonable?” Collaboration in Colonial Contexts
- The Special Responsibility of Public Spaces to Dismantle White Supremacist Historical Narratives
- Public Heritage as Transformative Experience: The Co-occupation of Place and Decision-Making
- The Social Sciences: What Role in Conservation?
- People in Place: Local Planning to Preserve Diverse Cultures
- Heritage as an Element of the Scenescape
- Contesting the Aesthetic Construction of Community: The New Suburban Landscape
- Agricultural Heritage and Conservation Beyond the Anthropocene
- Public Heritage in the Symbiocene
- Mapping Authenticity: Cognition and Emotion in Public Heritage
- Understanding Well-Being: A Mechanism for Measuring the Impact of Heritage Practice on Well-Being
- Effects of Conversations with Sites of Public Heritage on Collective Memory
- Intergenerational Learning: A Tool for Building and Transforming Cultural Heritage
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter traces the gestation of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention and the rise of the World Heritage title to a global brand and major catalyst for heritage aspirations, activities, and discourses. Despite conceptual reforms in the 1990s and a more nation-centered mode of World Heritage Committee operations since 2010, Northern dominance and biases persist. Global co-custodianship of sites has remained largely symbolic and the contribution of World Heritage to international cooperation and site conservation is uneven. World Heritage has clearly broadened conceptions of cultural heritage, even if inconsistently. Social effects of site designation tend to be complex, producing both winners and losers on the local level, with external actors extending their influence. Recent financial difficulties make ambitious change unlikely for the coming years. The power of the World Heritage title is increasingly at the mercy of the treaty states’ internal conditions, rather than of the global institutional framework.
Keywords: common heritage of mankind, cultural heritage, ICOMOS, IUCN, Melaka, North–South tensions, heritage tourism, UNESCO World Heritage, World Heritage Committee, world-making
Christoph Brumann, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.
Please subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.
For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.
- The Oxford Handbook of Public Heritage Theory and Practice
- About the Editors
- List of Contributors
- Introduction: Public Heritage as Social Practice
- Creating Universal Value: The UNESCO World Heritage Convention in Its Fifth Decade
- The Suffocated Cultural Heritage of Sub-Saharan Africa’s Protected Areas
- Sustainable Conservation of Urban Heritage: The Contribution of Governance-Focused Studies
- Heritage and the Politics of Cooperation
- Culture, Heritage, and the Politics of Becoming
- Problematizing the Idea of Heritage Management
- Heritage and Management, Professional Utopianism, Administrative Naiveté, and Organizational Uncertainty at the Shipwrecks of Pisa
- Accounting for What We Treasure: Economic Valuation of Public Heritage
- Cultural Heritage: Capital, Commons, and Heritages
- Heritage as Remaking: Locating Heritage in the Contemporary World
- Culturally Reflexive Stewardship: Conserving Ways of Life
- Neoliberalism and the Equivocations of Empire
- Public Heritage and the Promise of the Digital
- On the Need for a Nuanced Understanding of “Community” in Heritage Policy and Practice
- “What Could Be More Reasonable?” Collaboration in Colonial Contexts
- The Special Responsibility of Public Spaces to Dismantle White Supremacist Historical Narratives
- Public Heritage as Transformative Experience: The Co-occupation of Place and Decision-Making
- The Social Sciences: What Role in Conservation?
- People in Place: Local Planning to Preserve Diverse Cultures
- Heritage as an Element of the Scenescape
- Contesting the Aesthetic Construction of Community: The New Suburban Landscape
- Agricultural Heritage and Conservation Beyond the Anthropocene
- Public Heritage in the Symbiocene
- Mapping Authenticity: Cognition and Emotion in Public Heritage
- Understanding Well-Being: A Mechanism for Measuring the Impact of Heritage Practice on Well-Being
- Effects of Conversations with Sites of Public Heritage on Collective Memory
- Intergenerational Learning: A Tool for Building and Transforming Cultural Heritage
- Index
