Reconciling Nature and Culture in a Global Context? - Rainforest ...

Sandra Pannelland visitor information centres, which form the locus for tourist visitations to World Heritageproperties, unwittingly reproduce elements of these by-gone practices. For example, at theKīlauea Visitor Centre and Jaggar Museum within the World Heritage listed HawaiiVolcanoes National Park, native Hawaiian people and their beliefs are presented in atimeless mythological space, while their material culture, confined to stone-axe quarries andpetroglyphs, is located in a distant neolithic past. As depicted in the official Park brochure,‘Visiting Hawai’i Volcanoes’, native Hawaiian history (and by inference, native Hawaiiansthemselves) “fade[s] away” with the arrival of Europeans in 1778. The use of nativeHawaiian terms to describe some of the geological products of volcanism exemplifies thereification and temporal distancing of culture in this World Heritage property.As this example indicates, in attempting to present people and their values as ‘living’exemplars, readily intelligible to the viewing public, cultural heritage is often displayed as astaged performance or as an inanimate ethnographic spectacle. Yet, as BarbaraKirshenblatt-Gimblett observes, “[w]hile it looks old, heritage is actually something new”(1998: 7). Despite the language of the World Heritage Convention, and its discursive focusupon protection, preservation, restoration, and regeneration, heritage is a “new mode ofcultural production in the present that has recourse to the past” ibid: 149). In this sense,World Heritage listing “gives buildings, precincts, and ways of life that are no longer viable forone reason or another a second life as exhibits of themselves” (ibid: 150). Stamped with theimprimatur of World Heritage, listed monuments, historic centres, so-called ‘natural’ spaces,and ‘cultural landscapes’ become museums of themselves within a heritage tourismeconomy.… AND THE FINAL LESSON FROM THE WORLD HERITAGE LISTAs these comments suggest, the creation of new spaces is inimical to the production ofWorld Heritage. These ‘glocal’ spaces both enshrine and enact the conjuncture of the globaland the local. More than this, however, World Heritage branding invariably establishes thelocal as a destination product consumed by a primed global tourist market. In the context ofthe multi-billion dollar business of World Heritage tourism, the production of ‘glocality’ is alsoabout the production of difference, and it is here that the Convention’s cornerstone-conceptsof nature and culture are given localised form and meaning. In the dialectics of the globaland the local, it could be argued that listing signifies the end point of the process in whichlocal history is gradually beaten into something called ‘World Heritage’ within the natureculturecrucible offered by the Convention.In creating World Heritage, the Convention also creates, in many ways, a world withoutborders. As a highly organised global response to the myriad of local challenges facing theworld’s heritage, the Convention forms part of the new architecture of global governance.Through international treaties and policies of conservation and protection, such as the WorldHeritage Convention, “whole territories are now outside state authority” (Mbembe 2001: 50),as the political, economic and cultural sovereignty of nation-states is eroded in the post-ColdWar ‘new world order’. In this sense, UNESCO and its World Heritage ‘mission’ representsone of the many strategies, agencies and powerful interests that fall under the rubric ofglobalisation. While there is much talk about the impacts and anxieties created by thejuggernaut of globalisation (see Appadurai 2001), perhaps the final lesson to be learnt fromthe World Heritage List is about the fragility and inconclusiveness of such world-makingprojects. As the case studies illustrate, World Heritage – as both a global concept and, forsome, an imposed process – is subject to negotiation, opposition and a range ofaccommodations at the local level. In North Queensland, Aboriginal groups resist theimposition of ‘universal’ natural values, while in Komodo National Park, a soon-to-beestablishedCommunity Consultative Council will provide local people with a governmentendorsedsay in the new management and eco-tourism arrangements for the Park. InMacau and Helsinki, historic centres and monuments resonate with the cultural specificities76