Altamira Press UNESCO, Cultural Heritage, and Outstanding Universal Value: Value-based Analyses of the World Heritage and Intangible Cultural Heritage Conventions (Archaeology in Society)

This book explores the international legal framework developed by UNESCO to identify and protect world heritage and its implementation at the national level. Drawing on close policy analysis of UNESCO's major documents, extensive professional experience at UNESCO, as well as in-depth analyses of case studies from Asia, Europe, and Latin America, Sophia Labadi offers a nuanced discussion of the constitutive role of national understandings of a universalist framework. The discussion departs from considerations of the World Heritage Convention as Eurocentric and offers a more complex analysis of how official narratives relating to non-European and non-traditional heritage mark a subversion of a dominant and canonical European representation of heritage. It engages simultaneously with a diversity of discourses across the humanities and social sciences and with related theories pertaining not only to tangible and intangible heritage, conservation, and archaeology but also political science, social theory, tourism and development studies, economics, cultural, and gender studies. In doing so, it provides a critical review of many key concepts, including tourism, development, sustainability, intangible heritage, and authenticity. Review The World Heritage Convention of 1972 established a list of sites acknowledged by UNESCO to be of universal human value--World Heritage Sites. With the detailed knowledge of an insider to the heritage establishment and the critical perspective of an independent researcher, Sophia Labadi takes us through the key issues of how such sites can be compatible with cultural diversity, with notions of an authentic past, with sustainable development and tourism, and with social cohesion in the modern nation state. She finds fault with the implementation of the convention and its core value, while offering an astute resolution rooted in a more sensitive and pluralist cultural politics of tangible and intangible heritage for us all. This is essential reading for all concerned with contemporary heritage and the vital importance of the past to the present.--Michael Shanks, Stanford UniversityThis work provides an in-depth exploration of the basic concepts and mechanisms of the World Heritage Convention. As the Convention celebrates its 40th anniversary and reflects on its future, this book offers new insights into the reasons for its global success, into its prospects, and into its contradictions.--Francesco Bandarin, ADG Culture, UNESCO About the Author Sophia Labadi is director of the Centre for Cultural Heritage and lecturer at the University of Kent. She worked for UNESCO from 2004 to 2012.