Heritage Regimes and the State

Concepts and Contingencies in the Shaping of Heritage Regimes
experiences and identities (Smith 2006: 299). The authorization of heritage discourse
emanates from a close interconnection of relevant national institutions with
international organizations, such as UNESCO, that has distinguished between the
three major areas of heritage through its legal instruments of conventions: cultural,
divided into tangible and intangible, and natural heritage. The major documents
that stand in the focus of, provide impact on and initiate heritage studies are the
Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage,
adopted in 1972, and the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible
Cultural Heritage, adopted in 2003.
4 Engineering
An international convention is a legal instrument for United Nations member
states. They are invited to ratify it and subsequently follow the operational guidelines
for implementing the prescription of the document. The UNESCO conventions
call for signatory states to prepare inventories. If entries for various heritage
lists are sought, this entails the presentation of vast amounts of descriptive material.
In sum, the states need to carry out documentation, which poses a problem
from the vantage position concerned with the corollary effect in the reification of
culture. At the same time, any documentation is a parallel act to the historically
prevalent practices of collecting ethnographic artifacts in settings esteemed exotic,
whereas those collection endeavors were and are complexly (and often disturbingly)
related to the issues of ownership. Another disruptive impact of documentation
is related to the insurmountable discrepancy in making a judgment between singularity
and commonality in elements of culture. Documentation for UNESCOnomination
purposes concerns itself with and highlights the exceptional, even if
the opposite is what is aspired to. That is, the member state who proposes a nomination
in the sphere of Intangible Cultural Heritage, may claim to celebrate thus a
representational phenomenon in national culture, which tacitly refers to the quality
of typical in case of a widely disseminated practice. Nevertheless, what may have
appeared a habitual element for a community becomes singled out ever after. Regina
Bendix has described heritage nominations as reflecting small-scale powerplay
with large-scale effects of moralizing and ennobling. She contends that regimes
of quality control and evaluation are always present in the process of heritagization
(Bendix 2009). These activities build on the late-modern competitive
practices that correspond to and signify the tendencies of “audit culture,” thus
labeled and studied within academia by Marilyn Strathern (2000).
Inventorying is by default an act of classification that entails construction of
models and categorization of cultural knowledge. However, classification tends to
be historically contingent, while classificatory systems of thought appear to be
culturally biased (cf. Arantes 2009: 57). Therefore, particular segmentations of
social reality, assignment of categories and naming of diversities may not apply
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