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Dear colleagues and friends, old and not so old,
Thank you very much for coming along to this lecture this evening. I am pleased to see
so many of you here, from all parts of the university and from the wider world. My slightly
salacious, ‘seductive’ title and motif has obviously done its job. I’m afraid it’s
all very tame from here on in, so my apologies in advance to those who were expecting something
a little more spicy. Spicy this is not, but I hope it is revealing in some ways.
As we know, there are always three lectures for every one you give – the one you write,
the one you give, and the one you wish you had given. At the end of this, I’ll make
my mind up which it was, and I guess you will too.
This is actually my third inaugural Professorial lecture – though clearly my first one here
at Birmingham. By the end of it I should feel well and truly inaugurated – or maybe the
word is relieved. I have of course been in my role here for over two years now, and it
has been a positive, rich and immersive experience and not without its challenges. But that’s
the way it should be, for without challenges it is easy to lapse into routine, complacency
and a narrowness of vision and I hate complacency, and I react against routine and narrow vision.
I have been very pleased to link up with colleagues across and beyond the University that share
my feelings and have been so encouraging and helpful. Only last week I was at the University
of Illinois where their Chancellor and our Vice Chancellor signed off on an important
strategic alliance between our two universities. In being part of this process for the last
two years, what struck me during this visit was just what can be achieved by having a
bold and expansive vision worthy of a great University.
Before I launch into the lecture proper, I’d just like to take a moment to say some thank
yous. It’s okay, I’m not about to launch into some Academy Award speech where I thank
my ancestors and the cat, but I do want to say thanks to all my colleagues across the
College and the University who have supported me – and I hope will continue to do – in
my endeavours to re-position the Ironbridge International Institute for Cultural Heritage,
and to realise its full potential as a global player in the cultural heritage field. And
my thanks also have to be extended to the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, its Chairman,
Chief Executive, the senior management team and my fellow Board members. The Trust, with
its ten museums, the Ironbridge Gorge World Heritage Site, and the extensive landscape
of this most remarkable part of England, is integral to the success of the Institute and
is also one of the unique assets of this University.
Okay, thank yous over, and now to the focus of my lecture this evening. Given that my
Institute works closely with a World Heritage Site and that since arriving here I have been
trying to highlight the uniqueness of this relationship, I had almost no option but to
speak tonight on the subject of World Heritage. However, as I hope to elaborate, much of what
I have to say applies to all aspects of that we term ‘heritage’.
If the world really is “everything that is the case”, then it is composed of all
of what the past leaves us - what we have, individually and collectively, inherited.
Stripped bare, what we really have in the world is what anthropologist Daniel Miller
explores as ‘stuff’ – a wonderfully dense and messy concept that stands for artefacts,
objects and things and also people. It is ‘stuff’ that animates, and is animated
by, the immateriality of ideas, beliefs, values, rules, language and the like. We inherit stuff
and continually produce more stuff for future generations. What we commonly term heritage
is not additional to this stuff but is what we choose to value from it – again both
individually and collectively. No longer is the label of heritage layered upon the world
solely by official institutions, structured processes or through paternalistic State interventions.
Increasingly, it is constructed through individual and community practices, discourses and performances
that are ad hoc, reactive, cathartic and grounded in the search for meaning and identity. We
live with our own personal heritages every day. We work within collective heritage which
shapes our social and cultural identity. The ability, and the desire, to order the world
is an extensive trait of the human species. We work with ontological categories that help
us make sense of the world and it appears that in this category of heritage – diverse,
complex and contested though it is – we have found a useful means to curate the world.
No longer do we feel the need to wait centuries, even decades, before we denote some part of
life, some object, some experience, some collective memory, as heritage. Star Trek is heritage.
Star Wars is heritage. A cursory visit to that wonderful website of Ebay will show us
that in many ways heritage has broken free of its institutional moorings and is embedded
in everyday life to be consumed - collected, traded, displayed, used and admired. The rise
of the virtual museum, along with the Sunday morning car boot fair and the digital camera
are all part of a re-drawing of the boundaries of heritage. Nevertheless we still look toward
the instruments of the State to preserve, validate and construct heritage. We default,
in the main, to what Laurajane Smith refers to as the Authorised Heritage Discourse – an
officially scripted and informed understanding of what heritage is, and what it should be.
The past, the passing of time, and the stuff of the world is inevitable. Heritage, on the
other hand, is NOT inevitable. Rather it comes into the world, into our consciousness, because
we give it a place in our lives. It is both an invention and a discovery. Arguably it
is one of mankind’s most successful inventions - a constantly accumulating category, broad
and diverse enough to be meaningful to just about everyone. Its limits are elastic and
yet it can provide us with some stability, a rootedness, a focus for social cohesion
and a sense of who, and where, we are.
When I was a boy – not that long ago – there was no heritage, or rather I was not aware
of it. Rather, I was pre-occupied with life’s other pleasures. But I was fascinated by the
‘space race’ and at the time of the first moon landing, it seemed the future was to
be full of robots, 3 course meals in the form of one small pill, and telephones where we
could actually see the person we were speaking with and that we did not have to press buttons
A or B! The outlook was to the future, even to life beyond the earth. And heritage was
not the pre-occupation of the wider public, at least it did not seem that way in my home
town of Sunderland where ship-building was still industry and not industrial heritage.
It was to the future that communities looked for justice, liberty and peace. Now, as a
slightly older boy, it seems that we live in a world of heritage. Within a relatively
short period of time, it appears that in looking for development, progress and meaning, our
focus has shifted from the future and beyond this world, more to the past that is very
much anchored on our own planet. And now the world is full of heritage. We
are surrounded by the material and immaterial markers of the past, from the diminished Ozymandian
legacies of grand civilisations, to the grand remains of diminished civilisations. From
the prompts of what we would like to remember, to the nasty stains of what we may wish to
forget. From museums of everything, to the Antiques Roadshow, from steam trains to Downton
Abbey, from State sanctioned commemorations of great battles, to 1970s themed nightclubs.
We are wanderers in the world of heritage. There is an ongoing and rapid dialogical relationship
between our production of heritage and our consumption of it. And when we have had our
fill of our own heritage we seek out the heritage of others. Those that could travel have always
travelled to see the heritage of others – indeed, as a form of material colonialism, the objects
of ‘the other’ frequently travelled back to adorn the walls of museums and large houses
of the developed world. The dramatic expansion of international tourism to a point where
few areas of the planet remain untouched by the tourist, is closely tied to the expansion
of what we may loosely term the heritage industry. We are encouraged to be tourists of heritage
sites and increasingly encouraged to see these sites in the context of what John Tomlinson
terms, the culture of immediacy.
I am not offering any value judgement here but merely rehearsing that the relationships
between us and the world of heritage are multi-faceted and complex and bound to the processes of
global re-imagining and re-semanticisation. Previously, solid and sacred words such as
tradition and authenticity are no longer so. The narratives of heritage that were designed
for perpetuity, are challenged by the messy and shifting realities of globalisation of
which tourism is a part. Now, with some caveats, I am a big fan of tourism and of the tourist
– a category to which we all belong – precisely because it holds within it the possibilities
for development and inter-cultural dialogue, exchange and understanding that were once
the promise of the ‘space age’. However, I well understand that the relationship between
heritage and tourism is often conceived of as being oppositional. But the key point for
me is that heritage – and tourism - as categories, as actions and as systems of understanding,
are incapable of being dis-invented. They are powerful global realities and intimately
linked.
And so to the ‘World of World Heritage’ – a super, supra, category of heritage that
we have invented. When asked the question of how old is the World Heritage Site of the
Pyramids at Giza it would seem instinctive to give the answer of - approximately four
and a half thousand years. Of course the World Heritage Site of Memphis and its Necropolis
and the Pyramid Fields from Giza to Dahshur – to give it its full title – will celebrate
its thirty fifth anniversary in this year. For this is the great irony of World Heritage
- it is a very modern idea – indeed a very modernist idea. The 1972 Convention Concerning
the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage was put in place only three years
after the first men landed on the moon and marked, in its own way, a crossing point between
the optimism of future possibilities and the lessons of the past.
The meta - message of World Heritage is a courageous, positive and powerful one – that
there are tangible reminders of the past – which have the capacity to remind us all, now and
in the future, of the successes and failures of humanity. We should remind ourselves that
World Heritage is a project of UNESCO, in the context of the United Nations and borne
out of twentieth century turmoil, war, ignorance and the ongoing threat of physical and intellectual
destruction. To believe in, and speak of, concepts such as mankind, the international
community, common humanity and critically, outstanding universal value, back in 1972,
was a bold venture and very much part of a decidedly modernist vision of the world. It
also revealed an interesting intellectual continuity with enlightenment thinking, particularly
in its evocation of Kantian notions of both moral value and aesthetic taste applied to
both the works of man and nature. Kant saw moral value as absolute and unique, and beauty
as objective, having universal validity and capable of being arrived at through a rationality
that was also seen to be universal. In picking through the text of the Convention, indeed,
the numerous documents and charters that fed into it – in particular the Hague Convention
and the Venice Charter - and within the various iterations of the Operational Guidelines for
the Implementation of the Convention, there are the footprints of Kantian philosophy which
adheres to a belief in a universalism. This is only reflecting the UNESCO rationale of
the “intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind.” This is a gracious and worthy
sentiment and one that is difficult to disagree with. The values enshrined in the 1972 Convention
are fundamental core values, and I stand by my earlier reflections that within the parameters
it sets itself, the Convention remains a remarkable, prescient and powerful trans-national intervention.
The ideas of universalism and transcendence and the language through which these are expressed
are powerfully seductive. In particular, the use of the term ‘world’ encourages us
to imagine a genuine sense of transnational governance, a global authority that acts in
favour of all humanity. This is given additional credence by the fact that 190 States have
ratified the Convention and there is strength in numbers. Through the State signatories
to the Convention UNESCO fulfils a role as guardian of cultural and natural heritage
“under threat” that is recognised to be “unique and irreplaceable” and whose “deterioration
or disappearance” would constitute a “harmful impoverishment of the heritage of all the
nations of the world”, presumably including the handful of nations that have not signed
up to the Convention. At one level it could be argued that to be included in the World
Heritage List is to acknowledge the fragility and uniqueness of a particular site and an
awareness that it is under particular threat. At another level, this could be seen to suggest
the weakness of governance for heritage on the part of the member states and their inability
to protect their own sites. In cases relating to developing countries, where the principles
and practices of heritage management and appropriate legislation for site protection may not have
fully evolved, intervention through the efforts of UNESCO as a response is welcome. Reading
the sheer number of sites now designated as World Heritage, and taking into account the
largely unaltered text of the Convention, it would seem that there have never been so
many heritage sites in need of protection! Locating World Heritage within a wider understanding
of global sociology is helpful in allowing us to understand the desire to be part of
what Elliot and Schmutz term the “Universal Cultural Order”. The ‘world’ as a holistic
entity, as something greater than the sum of its parts and which implies action and
conduct ‘global’ in scope, is a distinctly modernist idea and is paralleled in the development
of modern environmentalism and the language that emerged from United Nation’s Stockholm
Declaration on the Human Environment dating from the same year of the World Heritage Convention
and, from the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development. As Joanne Pemberton has argued,
through her examination of the global metaphor, the idea of the global is highly seductive,
with a rhetoric that pervades the cultural sphere as well as economic and technological
interests, and is ready made for political discourse. The very word ‘world’ is laden
with expectations and assumptions that are made manifest when it is widely accepted and
applied. It carries within it several meanings. It implies universal acknowledgement, akin
to the notion of a ‘world’ championship where, out of the processes of contestation
between several, a winner emerges. It implies ranking and reward, where ‘world’ heritage
receives a metaphorical gold medal and as a consequence other heritage sites do not.
It also creates what Michael Herzfeld calls a “global hierarchy of values” that manifests
itself in policy decisions and resource allocations.
To be a World Heritage Site is to have participated in a process of evaluation. At one level this
is a kind of accreditation; an outcome or reward for matching up to a set of widely
accepted criteria, however contested they may be. A heritage site, property or landscape
is ‘tested’ against the over-arching concept of Outstanding Universal Value. This has been
long debated inside and outside of the UNESCO sphere, and while firmly embedded in the 1972
Convention and remaining the fundamental condition for the inscription of World Heritage, since
the first twelve sites were inscribed in 1978, there have been numerous attempts to examine
and refine the concept and the way it is mobilised in selecting Sites for the World Heritage
List. Over the years the Criteria have been refined and since a review of the Operational
Guidelines in 2005 there are now ten criteria; the first six dealing in the main with cultural
heritage and the remaining four dealing with natural heritage. The Operational Guidelines
themselves have undergone several reviews in the normative course of events and though
the principle of Outstanding Universal Value has remained sacrosanct in the listing of
World Heritage, we can identify shifts in the ways it has been interpreted. Christina
Cameron in a keynote paper to a Special Expert Meeting on the World Heritage Convention held
in Kazan in 2005 identified that in the mid-1980s the interpretation of the term Outstanding
Universal Value shifted from something which equated to ‘best of the best’ and was
in effect applied to sites which were already widely recognised as being ‘iconic’, to
an interpretation of sites being “representative of the best.” In the Operational Guidelines
which came into being in 2005, Outstanding Universal Value was defined as being “so
exceptional as to transcend national boundaries and to be of common importance for present
and future generations of all humanity.” This is a powerful claim but it begs so many
questions: In what ways do World Heritage Sites transcend national boundaries? How does
this transcendental value manifest itself? And what is actually meant by the term common
importance for present and future generations and, important in what sense? Despite elaborate
and nuanced discussions which have taken place over the years around this core concept of
value and the attendant World Heritage Criteria, it is noticeable that adjustments have been
slight and even re-enforcing. Value is largely defined as relating to the material being
of the Site with emphasis upon issues such as integrity and authenticity. Historical
values, along with artistic or aesthetic values, are given primacy in what former President
of ICOMOS Michael Petzet has referred to as “classical values”. We can see the lineage
tracing itself back to Enlightenment thought with this emphasis upon non-instrumental values
almost in a self-generating and self-sustaining way to produce, via a rational and objective
process, World Heritage. But whatever intellectual challenges the concept generates, the key
point is that it has accepted authority through the signatories to the Convention; an authority
that has also been accentuated through accumulated practice.
In principle a claim as to what constitutes Outstanding Universal Value needs to be clear
and unambiguous. In practice it is a matter of judgment, collectively arrived at and based
in experience that is inevitably relative, subjective and where the line between World
Heritage winners and losers is a fine one. This is not to denigrate the subjectivity
of the approach but merely to recognise it. To have a World Heritage Site within a region
or nation state carries considerable symbolic value. The value of having some mark of global
status is part of the process of identity construction. In the same way that world champions
in sport are appropriated by nation states, region, cities and even more localised communities,
being acknowledged as ‘having’ a World Heritage site is a way of participating in
the world. To be able to display the World Heritage badge is to be a member of the ‘being
part of the world club’ and in part, it helps to explain the desire for nations to
keep proffering candidates for inscription. While heritage is widely held up as an instrument
of nation building, at the same time and rather counter-intuitively, this also has to be seen
as wishing to participate in the globalising inter-connected world. As I was proudly told
by a senior official almost immediately when I was visiting Lithuania some years ago “we
have twice as many world heritage sites as Latvia.” In fact Lithuania has four sites
and one it shares with Lativa and one with Russia. But the enthusiasm in such a declaration
has behind it the story of a major cultural re-adjustment for this post-socialist state.
What is telling about the World Heritage List as it approaches 1,000 sites is not only the
burgeoning number of properties already inscribed, but the longer list of properties which have
been submitted to the Tentative List – the waiting room for global recognition. At present
this stands at one thousand, five hundred and seventy six properties, put forward by
176 States. The average number of sites inscribed on the World Heritage List each year – since
its first year of 1978 - is 28. Roughly speaking and assuming no change in the number of tentative
properties this would keep UNESCO busy for the next 54 years or so. Do we read this as
the success of the Convention? An improved recognition of heritage that transcends borders?
A triumph of globalism? A re-emergence of nationalism? A game too easily played and
the dilution of value? A meta-search for identity? Disenchantment with the present and lack of
faith in the future? Or economic desperation and the need for a new type of resource to
feed development? Inevitably, there are arguments for each and indeed all of such readings,
and several issues emerge. I will note only two at present.
The first relates to the notion of ‘having’. For while having World Heritage status can
be, and is, widely proclaimed by a member nation state, it is also signalling the movement
to the realms of global ownership – for the world and on behalf of the world. In legal
terms this of course is not much more than metaphorical ownership. Moreover, legal ownership
is not the same as moral ownership and this brings up its own issues around the processes
by which member states seek to inscribe sites, and the level to which communities of interest
are, or are not, involved in the process. A second issue returns to the seductive potency
of the ‘world’ concept. The privately instigated campaign of the New Seven ‘World
Wonders’, the brainchild of Swiss / Canadian mobile phone millionaire Bernard Weber, was
designed to create a category of important heritage sites. The campaign which began in
2002 and culminated in 2007 when the ‘new’ Seven World Wonders were announced clearly
differed in its approach from UNESCO. Here the public voted for their favourite heritage
site in open competition – using Weber’s mobile phone company of course and, not surprisingly,
nations voted for their own sites. The website for the campaign proudly proclaimed that “the
Official New 7 Wonders of the World have been elected by more than 100 million votes to
represent global heritage throughout history.” After initial liaison, UNESCO distanced itself
from the initiative. What could loosely be termed an ‘alternative’, if shorter list,
of World Heritage was compiled over a short period of time and without any scientific
scrutiny or detailed consideration. Seven sites were voted into existence and all had
already been inscribed on the ‘official’ World Heritage List. What was interesting
about this campaign, despite the criticisms of UNESCO, was the way it was enthusiastically
embraced by the governments of the twenty finalists. It pointed to a need for ‘world’
recognition and also to the exposure it gave such sites which, in the minds of the supporting
nations, correlated to increased visitor numbers. While significant research is still lacking
with regard to the impact of this campaign and subsequent initiatives relating to natural
heritage and urban heritage, there is evidence that some sites did generate increased volumes
of tourists through the exposure it brought about.
So far I have mainly focused on the lure of World Heritage to nation states, but to what
extent are we as individuals, almost always as tourists, seduced by them? It is difficult
to think of World Heritage Sites without imagining swarms of tourists taking photographs, lines
of parked tour buses and attendant souvenir stalls. Clearly this is the case amongst the
more commonly studied and troubled sites such as Venice or the historic centres of Florence
and Rome – all of which are urban sites and long standing tourist destinations anyway.
The entanglements existing between World Heritage and tourism are in evidence across the marketing
and communication networks that pervade the developed and the developing world. Many destinations,
whether at the national or at regional scale, privilege ‘World’ heritage amongst their
inventories of attractions in actions of genuine pride, but also in the knowledge that they
carry an additional appeal for the tourist market. Tour operators devise their routes
and itineraries to include World Heritage Sites as ‘highlights’ and there are operators
that specialise in packaging World Heritage centred itineraries. The British based company
Hurlingham Travel offers – somewhat unrealistically - the ‘World’s Most Expensive Vacation’
- at 1.5 million dollars - to see all of the World Heritage Sites in ‘luxury’, cutting
through some 157 countries. While it appears that no one, as yet, has undertaken the tour
it demonstrates in the extreme the prestige that is loaded onto the World Heritage label.
UNESCO itself plays to the realities of the iconic role of World Heritage Sites in national
tourism marketing campaigns and frequently carries advertisements for country destinations
and National Tourist Organisations in its World Heritage magazine that frame heritage
sites and landscapes, not only as having particular values which need protecting but as places
for tourists to visit.
Guide-books similarly give prominence to World Heritage in their prescriptive narratives
of destinations. Visual texts directed to prospective tourists by way of national advertising
campaigns and filmic montages that aim to provide a scopic overview of place in a limited
time, again, strongly feature images of World Heritage Sites and, in a similar vein, creative
works of film, literature and commercial advertising, have, knowingly and unknowingly, increasingly
employed World Heritage Sites as both background and foreground for story purposes. In the
vernacular recollections of journeys and holidays that now litter cyberspace in the form of
blogs and personal diaries, replete as they are with copious photographs, visits to World
Heritage Sites are accorded a degree of detail and reverence and a visit to them has become
a kind of social marker of achievement. What is important to note about these various representations
of World Heritage and their intersections with the realms of tourism, is that they speak
of a process of both conscious and unconscious appropriation whereby the sites, structures
and landscapes that have been accorded “outstanding universal value” through the UNESCO procedure,
are then projected and promoted for possessing this value by agents that normally have had
no direct input into the processes of valuation and assessment. Such appropriation is an entirely
rational action on a number of grounds.
First, for a tour operator or destination marketing organisation, it is common sense
to draw upon those resources that will attract tourists by virtue of their strong aesthetic
appeal or some other feature that will ‘promise’ the tourist a note-worthy experience. What
we may term the ‘attractiveness’ of World Heritage requires deeper interrogation but
it does not conform to any universalist doctrine. I remember being decidedly dis-enchanted when
visiting the Site of Smashed in Head Buffalo Jump in Southern Alberta, which in my book
goes down as one of the most boring World Heritage Sites there is. Baroque churches
and cathedrals also do nothing for me and in the main I am not drawn to pre-historic
World Heritage Sites. Now, I may be atypical – my leading candidates for World Heritage
listing would include the Favelas of Rio, the Townships of South Africa, Sellafield,
Disneyland and Blackpool – which almost made the UK Tentative List, however, the point
remains is that beauty may well be in the eye of the tourist rather than that of ICOMOS
and the World Heritage Committee. Nonetheless, the consistent and longstanding highlighting
of World Heritage in tourism marketing campaigns does act to further embed sites in public
consciousness and accentuates their value. They accrue their own social capital by virtue
of their very presence in the public sphere. The overlap of World Heritage Sites with the
iconic markers of international travel and tourism that pre-date the 1972 Convention
– the Pyramids of Giza, Statue of Liberty, Coliseum of Rome, Taj Mahal, etc. - points
to a recognised value outside of the UNESCO process and that resonates with a wider system
of representation and recognition that tourism taps into and which Roland Barthes recognised
in his well-known critique of the guidebook as a form of reductionism.
Second, the ways by which the tourism sector draws on World Heritage speaks to an accepted
authority of UNESCO and its transnational influence. Implicitly this is an acceptance
of the ten criteria used to evaluate World Heritage and the over-arching concept of ‘outstanding
universal value’. Though not articulated as such, the vast, diverse and fragmented
tourism sector that readily adopts the images and stories of World Heritage, are effectively
validating the power of UNESCO in deciding that some aspects of tangible cultural heritage
are more important, significant and outstanding than other aspects. Within the discourse of
marketing, UNESCO provides the ultimate endorsement of a product, taking it from the self-appointed
processes of national interest and parochial concern and into the apparent realms of something
‘objectively verified’ and of ‘trans-national’ importance. This allows a tour operator, or
a destination, to move away from saying that tourists should visit a site because the national
or regional authority suggests we should, but rather that there is a higher authority,
with a more persuasive voice, that can direct the tourist to something special.
Third, and related to what I have just mentioned, the layers of value that accumulate through
the label of World Heritage and the additional pulling power this implies, is perceived to
bestow a potential economic premium in the form of an increased volume of tourists plus,
additional tourist-related development, mainly in the form of retail and accommodation. In
terms of attracting increased tourist numbers fundamental economic rationality entails that
the category of World Heritage presents a market opportunity for those engaged in tourism.
The diversity of sites, the dissemination of norms, the discourse of international conventions,
together with the role played by international institutions and the mass media in the promotion
and diffusion of World Heritage values and, what Marcotte and Bourdeau note as the brand
reputation of both the World Heritage and UNESCO label, all points to the power and
pervasiveness of a universalist perspective and to the UNESCO meta-narrative of unity
in diversity - with the World Heritage List as the emblematic expression of this.
One aspect of a growing dis-enchantment with the World Heritage Process – or at least
a slow realisation – is the fact that inscription on the World Heritage List is not normally
accompanied by additional resources for site protection. A World Heritage Fund does exist
to allow UNESCO to support remedial work for urgently threatened sites but this is extremely
limited, totalling at the moment, approximately only four million dollars. Rather, being on
the World Heritage List implies a long term resource commitment with finances required
for the management of the site. In a sense, this could increasingly be seen to be a disincentive
to States to nominate sites for inscription. Looking forward, the combination of higher
costs and economic recession – or at least a realignment of financial priorities – may
well slow down the World Heritage Listing process. It would seem that instances of deterioration
of a properties due to lack of resource are scheduled to increase and with the lack of
real interventionary power and finance all that UNESCO and the World Heritage Committee
has to work with are the sanctions of flagging the site as being in danger and ultimately,
‘de-listing’ – or ‘de-branding’ the site. At the same time, and in an attempt
to see the glass half full rather than half empty, sites will need to more productive
and efficient. The conventional argument is to point to the raised profile of being a
World Heritage Site and the symbolic capital this represents. This is essentially an argument
of leverage, based upon the premise that the site will attract financial resources because
of the public and political recognition attained. But this would appear to be more of a working
assumption rather than a scientific argument and it requires further research. Anecdotally,
World Heritage Sites seem to struggle with models of financial sustainability and in
line with many other heritage sites, are located in the realm of public subsidy by virtue of
their more intangibly expressed ‘non-use’ values within the public policy domain.
Here is one of the key paradoxical issues related to being on the World Heritage List.
Designating a site as World Heritage is founded upon a particular notion of value, collectively
expressed and endorsed through the signatories to the Convention. The concept of Outstanding
Universal Value, is accepted as being the measure to demarcate ‘World Heritage’
from ‘other’ heritage however, this is largely considered as a form of intrinsic
value and as such it treats sites and properties as essentially non-market ‘goods’. And
yet, once a site has been accorded this value – in material terms it bears the World Heritage
symbol - it becomes marketable. It is this ‘branding’ process which appears to generate
touristic interest, or rather increased touristic interest to the site. Symbolic value is bestowed
upon a site by virtue of the processes, narratives and discourses drawn from the Convention and
played out by designated individuals and organisations. This ‘brand value’ can stimulate visits
to the site and in various forms and formats be transformed into economic value. This transformation
can be dramatic, as in the well cited case of the Iwami Ginzan silver mine complex on
Honshu Island in Japan when before it was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2007
it attracted around 15,000 visitors a year. As a World Heritage Site in 2008 it attracted
nearly 1 million visitors.
There are of course less dramatic examples, and others where the label of World Heritage
has produced little or no effect. Indeed, the vast majority of the 981 World Heritage
Sites are not so alluring to tourists. There are many reasons for this – too many to
go into here - but they reflect not only surface issues of difficult physical access and poor
marketing but deeper clashes of values and socio-cultural meaning.
The country of Jordan has four World Heritage Sites. Petra, the red rose city of the Nabbateans,
inscribed in 1985 is the one that most of us have heard of, along with Wadi Rum, most
recently inscribed and familiar to us from its supporting role in the movie Lawrence
of Arabia. Its other listed sites are the desert castle of Quseir Amra and Um er-Rasas
– a former Roman, Byzantine settlement noted for the mosaics of St Stephens church. In
2009 the number of visitors to Petra was approximately 780,000 – ironically many of these generated
as a result of Petra being named as a ‘winner’ in the New World Wonders campaign. At Um er-Rasas,
a generous estimate of visitors in 2009 would be around 9,000 with many of these being school
visits and archaeological tours. During a visit to Um er-Rasas in 2008 I witnessed the
construction of a large and optimistically conceived visitor centre at this remote location.
The locals seemed to enthusiastically welcome the visitor centre – not least as its building
was providing employment and it was being part funded through a European Union Programme
- and the promise of tourists coming to what is a very depressed area of the country. One
of the people I talked with at the site was a local community health worker who knew of
the area’s long-standing problems. He posed a rhetorical but pointed question when he
said “How do we address the problems of this community when we have only piles of
stones?” This is not an untypical view amongst many World Heritage communities, including
those in the UK. The relationship which the local community has with Um–er Rasas is
not a negative one. Indeed, locals are generally proud of the apparent international recognition
for the site. They are certainly welcoming of the visitors which do come. and are generally
respectful of the site and the archaeological work which goes on there. But behind this
searching and serious question there are a host of other questions which are often not
fully articulated or struggle to be heard. An initial question relates to what I term
the ‘Star Trek’ effect which refers to how a site suddenly comes into the world.
Of course it is not suddenly beamed into existence, and is often the outcome of a long process
but, for communities that have not been engaged in the process this is how it seems sometimes.
While there are many signs of various sorts at World Heritage Sites which address the
history and architecture of the buildings and monuments I am yet to see one which explains
to me – as a tourist - and more importantly to the local population, WHY this is a WORLD
heritage site and HOW it became such. This also goes for tour guides whose official narratives
remain seemingly trapped in long descriptions of architectural styles. This obvious process
of communication is provided for in the Convention – particularly under articles 27 and 28
– but there is more work to be done by state parties proactively, directed by UNESCO and
IUCN, at this fundamental level to explain the hows and whys of Sites - not only to heritage
enthusiasts and not only to tourists, but to local communities and wider society.
The question I remember from my fleeting acquaintance with this man in remote Jordan, is to me indicative
of a dis-enchantment – actual and potential – with World Heritage, indeed many aspects
of authorised heritage, amongst communities around the world. When speaking of an inventory
of nearly 1,000 sites across the globe, I well aware of the generalisation trap – in
all directions - BUT, particularly in developing economies, and still with the after-shock
of economic uncertainty and re-positioning within developed countries also, and indeed,
in the context of UNESCO’s own severe financial problems, there is a need to re-assess the
World Heritage category and process, not within its own terms of reference but in relation
to the wider contexts of social, cultural and economic change.
A key issue is that there is a strong sense in which World Heritage is seen as an end
point in itself and somewhat distanced, even remote, from wider social goals. It is important
to make the distinction between the evaluation of heritage and its value. The evaluation
process which takes place, despite its objective ideal, invariably can lapse into issues of
taste as articulated more by Bourdieu than by Kant. In addition it is frequently coloured
by politics played out at local and global levels. The making of World Heritage is, through
the quasi-rational interpretation of the term outstanding universal value – chiefly an
evaluation. The process tells us whether a heritage site gains status or not. The values
which count in this case are what I would term integral – that is they are of the
object. Now, we can continue to debate issues of validity, expression, communication and
efficacy with regard to the evaluation and designation of World Heritage, but this does
not address the question of what do we do with it? How do we close the distance between
having World Heritage in the World and extracting the value we accord to it and which it is
capable of accumulating? This involves setting an agenda for World Heritage which is far
more pragmatic and utilitarian in its approach. It was John Dewey who said that value was
a function not of whim, nor purely of social construction, but a quality situated in events.
Dewey of course was primarily focused upon art and its integrity within culture and everyday
experience, but the parallel is rather obvious. To paraphrase Dewey, World Heritage needs
to part of everyone's lives and not just the privilege of any particular group. There is
no automatic route to universal acceptance. The term ‘world’ needs to mean the world
as constituted by its people and the rest of the stuff around it. To draw upon another
pragmatist, Richard Rorty, we need to move beyond the mere vocabulary of value and perform
it.
World Heritage is a total social fact. We cannot dis-invent it, nor should we. But despite
the fact that we have spent over forty years creating it, remarkably we know precious little
about its impact and implications. We know much about the objects of World Heritage and
the processes that make them such, but we know precious little about how communities
of interest – locals, tourists, policy makers in the wider economy etc. – encounter and
engage with them. How do we make sense of World Heritage? What does it contribute to
identities at local, regional and national level? In relation to the myriad of other
heritage forms and formats, what meanings does it convey? We need to better understand
the languages of engagement, the ways in which communities encounter and process the meanings
that are encoded within world heritage. Again the emphasis is not upon the material structures
of heritage but rather upon the relationships – actual and potential – it shares with
its audiences – super-diverse as they are now. Translating heritage is no longer about
shouting louder but about finding genuine connections. To what extent does World Heritage
displace other heritage forms? What good does it do and what good can it do? How can we
implicate World Heritage in wider projects of social and economic development? This is
not a hint toward some kind of neo-liberalist strategy for what clearly does have value
and import for the world above the forces of the market. Rather, it is a steer towards
a World Heritage site which delivers a more pragmatic and utilitarian value beyond itself.
In other words: seeing World heritage not as an end in itself but as a means to other
ends. These other ends will vary from site to site, state to state but critically one
would assume they need to be aligned with the Millennium Development Goals. The eight
goals which are approaching the 2015 deadline set, are meant to underpin all of UNESCO’s
strategies and activities and yet I do not see the links between World Heritage and the
development agenda as being very well developed. There are of course other ends and priorities
which ebb and flow in relation to global and local events. And of course, there are other
UNESCO Conventions with which the World Heritage Convention is NOT well aligned with. With
the 2003 Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage, itself a philosophical and political
challenge, we are in danger of repeating the problems that beset the World Heritage List.
I would argue that we need new intimacies with World Heritage. A cognitive or intellectual
intimacy which will allow a breaking down of boundaries between a concern for sites
and objects and what these mean across the cross-cultural currents that flow around us.
An experiential intimacy, that allows active involvement with World Heritage as a focus
for education, economy and social action. And ultimately, an emotional intimacy that
will allow closer personal engagement with sites as emblematic of questions of history,
society and politics.
UNESCO is beginning to take a more instrumental view of World Heritage. In its programme of
sustainable tourism for instance, it is seeking to implicate sites at the centre of local
economies and communities. It has begun to see the value of its own ‘brand’ and the
need to educate a wider public in the meaning of World Heritage so that it can protect Outstanding
Universal Value. While cynics may see this as too little too late and, an inadequate
response to an extensive self-generated global system of elite heritage, we are – as they
say – where we are!
We have opportunities to firmly embed World Heritage into everyday life – back to where
it came from so to speak - so that it does not resemble disconnected isolated islands
of the past stuff floating in a sea of future expectation. We need to demonstrate that heritage,
and World Heritage in particular, while being of the past can play a role in the building
of futures. And all of this brings me back to the role of the Ironbridge International
Institute for Cultural Heritage and my building programme, and the extensive research and
policy agenda that we need to engage with. It is an agenda that clearly needs to be international
and thematically inclusive, linking questions of World Heritage with other categories of
heritage, cultural heritage with natural heritage and tangible with intangible heritage. It
is also a research agenda that is multi and cross-disciplinary, and I hope that during
this lecture I have demonstrated that within the realms of World Heritage alone, important
issues are raised that relate not only to economics, law and politics but to philosophy,
anthropology, sociology, linguistics and geography. Focusing on heritage and its close companion,
tourism, requires us to address searching questions relating both to historical and
contemporary contexts, to issues of colonialism, nationalism, power, translation, mobilities,
memory, narrative, identity, religion, representation, media and development.
And in the Ironbridge Gorge World Heritage Site, known for its creativity in both the
early eighteenth century and today, we have an amazing laboratory and a strong partnership
that can feed into, and feed off, our research agenda. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope that
we can continue to work together on this exciting agenda and I thank you all very much for listening.
Thank you.
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