Heritage Regimes and the State

Concepts and Contingencies in the Shaping of Heritage Regimes
Having that in mind, my suggestion is to take the situated character of globalization
seriously also in the critical study of heritage regimes, despite their seemingly
common mechanism on an abstract level. While considering the contended perceptions
of globalism, Anna Tsing has asked anthropologists to extend their study
of communities as narrowly defined social spheres to a wider-ranging scope of
(transnational) networks, social movements and state policies (Tsing 2002: 472).
Transnational and global networks glossed as “universal” tendencies need to be
ethnographically studied to unravel encounters, trajectories and engagements.
Nevertheless, such processes with their global implications should not be observed
simply as cases of imposed hegemony or self-evident homogenization: Global
phenomena may unify, but they also show local cultural divergence (Tsing 2002:
477).
Richard Handler has contended that cultural processes (such as heritage curation)
are inherently particular and particularizing, so it would be unjustified to expect
the reverberations and effect of a global policy to function and produce similar
results under diverse circumstance (Handler 2002). An anthropological approach
advocates an investigation that utilizes different perspectives to contribute
to our understanding of the social world by complicating simplicities. Concrete
cases will benefit from being studied from a multi-sited perspective (as suggested
by George Marcus 1998), which analyzes decision-making on various levels: international,
national and particularly local. Thus this “local” also needs to be studied
and analyzed as a multi-sited field.
Research on communities will penetrate deeper if investigated as particularities.
Different circumstances make communities of people perceive and employ the
emergent potential of recognized agency and the acknowledgment of their cultural
rights differently. The claim of universality is found fault with as embodying Western
values and codes of behavior that are perceived to be similarly interpreted and
ready for application everywhere with insufficient consideration of the local experience.
Critical concerns voiced in this respect suggest instead that communities
and their insider experience should be involved in studies that employ pluralist
approaches (cf. Messer 1997). It seems important not only to elucidate negative
experience and the violation of rights, but also to define and investigate moments
of empowerment, real instances of emergent agency, and situations where local
actors partake in grassroots policy-making. “Universal” rights acquire meaning as
they are applied in local variation. Therefore, carefully explored particularities
should help us complicate the simplicity of a detached universalism of criticizing
an institutional regime.
8 References
Appadurai, Arjun (2002): Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination.
In The Anthropology of Politics: A Reader in Ethnography, Theory, and
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