Anthropologizing and indigenizing heritage: The origins of the UNESCO Global Strategy for a representative,balanced and credible World Heritage List

Introduction

Since its adoption by the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1972, the World Heritage Convention has evolved from a specialized conservation instrument to UNESCO’s flagship program. Multiple stakeholders across the world—governments, economic actors, and conservationists—seek recognition of a given site’s “outstanding universal value” through its inscription on the World Heritage List (UNESCO, 1972). The Convention constitutes a potent lens into how heritage is understood “in political, cultural, economic, and spiritual terms” (Meskell, 2013: 492). The World Heritage label provides the added values of enhanced protection, increased political prestige and public awareness, and economic development through international aid and tourism expenditures. Based on the universalistic aspirations of UNESCO, all cultures should be proportionately represented on the list. The 1994 Global Strategy for a Representative, Balanced and Credible World Heritage (henceforth designated Global Strategy) is commonly understood as being the first attempt to remedy imbalances on the World Heritage List. Based on untapped archival records, this article shows how the Global Strategy emerged from lengthy prior discussions reaching to the early 1980s: notably, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) Archives in Paris, France; the Herb Stovel Papers at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada; the World Heritage Archives of Parks Canada in Ottawa, Canada; and the Office of International Affairs Archives of the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) in Washington, D.C., United States. Most importantly, it demonstrates how new actors introduced novel ideas in the debate in 1994, giving a particular spin to the Global Strategy. Somewhat surprisingly, these actors did not come from the world regions designated as its prime beneficiaries: namely, the South, which was vastly underrepresented on the World Heritage List. Rather, a key finding of this study is that these actors were still firmly located in the North but had failed to be involved in prior expert discussions on cultural World Heritage because of their disciplinary background—anthropology—or their specific geographical positioning—in the former settler colonies of the British Empire (henceforth designated post-settler states). Indeed, the Global Strategy marked an anthropological turn in the global conceptualization of cultural heritage—one shaped by a French anthropologist close to Claude Lévi-Strauss, Isac Chiva. It also internationalized the concerns of Australia over the inclusion of its long-repressed indigenous minorities.

This article yields new insights into the production of heritage norms and values. Laurajane Smith has coined the term “authorized heritage discourse” to designate a monolithic and “Western” discourse prioritizing the aesthetic and physical qualities of heritage and legitimizing a technical and supposedly scientific model of heritage management internationally (Smith, 2006: 87–88). This discourse was largely constituted and reinforced through the postwar flurry of international conventions and codes of professional best practice (Smith, 2006: 113–114). This study refines Smith’s concept by providing evidence that on an international level, there were multiple competing Western interpretations of heritage, and of World Heritage in particular.

By illuminating the intricate influences shaping the reconceptualization of cultural World Heritage in the early 1990s, this article resonates with Anna Tsing’s call for locating “global dreams” ethnographically rather than “renaturaliz[ing]” them through a globalist method (Tsing, 2000: 342). The approach here is historical rather than ethnographic, but the goal is also to identify the specific localities and forces shaping global projects. In addition, this study is consonant with the efforts of cultural anthropologists to conceive of world culture outside a reductive center-periphery framework (Appadurai, 1990; Hannerz, 1987, 1989a, 1989b; Kearney, 1996). The origins of the Global Strategy demonstrate that cultural influences are complex and varied: they flowed from multiple points at the periphery of cultural heritage conceptualization in geographical (Australia) or disciplinary (anthropology) terms. Hence, they did not involve a unidirectional flow from a single center to a periphery defined in post-colonial terms, nor did they imply an assertive reaction on the part of the post-colonial world.

Finally, this article contributes to the growing literature on the inner workings of UNESCO in the cultural realm. In addition to work limited to a textual analysis of official documents (Eriksen, 2001; Smith, 2006; Stoczkowski, 2009), anthropologists, archaeologists, economists, and geographers have begun to explore UNESCO’s governance and bureaucratic processes in the cultural field (Nielsen, 2011), notably through the lens of its heritage conventions (Bertacchini et al., 2010; Bortolotto, 2010, 2013; Brumann, 2011, 2012, 2014; Hafstein, 2009; Logan, 2012; Meskell, 2011, 2012, 2013; Rudolff, 2010; Schmitt, 2009, 2011). This study benefits from a historical perspective which moves beyond discourse analysis in order to uncover the actors, dynamics, and motivations at play in UNESCO’s contribution to the making and remaking of global heritage. Indeed, the existing historical scholarship on UNESCO focuses primarily on political, social, and intellectual questions—including race, education, and the crafting of history—to the detriment of culture (Brattain, 2007; Duedahl, 2011; Rothschild, 2008; Shepard, 2011; Sluga, 2010; Wong, 2008). The existing literature on the World Heritage Convention tells a succinct or partial story for the origins of the Global Strategy. While providing valuable insights into the immediate lead-up to the Global Strategy, former (1992–2002) ICOMOS World Heritage Coordinator Henry Cleere begins his narrative in earnest in 1992–1993 (Cleere, 1996: 230, 231, 2011: 176). Heritage studies scholar Sophia Labadi pays attention to the 1980s efforts to produce a more representative World Heritage List. Because she mostly relies on official UNESCO documents, however, she partially uncovers the internal debates behind the steps taken, including the Global Strategy (Labadi, 2012: 37–39, 45–46). Heritage practitioners Christina Cameron and Mechtild Rössler provide the most comprehensive analysis of the origins of the Global Strategy, including a careful study of the various initiatives of the 1980s and early 1990s (Cameron and Rössler, 2013: 75–85). They complement official UNESCO documents with interviews, but only two of the actors quoted were directly involved in this process: Anne Raidl, chief of the International Standards of the UNESCO Division of Cultural Heritage, and Cleere. This article departs from these accounts by using hitherto untouched archival materials to unearth debates that were not recorded in UNESCO documents. It thus highlights both innovative ideas that were already articulated in the 1980s and the origins of key concepts of the Global Strategy. In addition, it provides a much needed contextualization of these concepts by setting them against their intellectual and cultural background.

Background

Heritage conservation was globalized in the context of the cultural internationalism of the interwar and the post-Second World War periods. A specialized agency of the United Nations system, UNESCO was founded in 1946 with the task of promoting peace “through the educational and scientific and cultural relations of the peoples of the world” (UNESCO, 1945). It replaced an interwar institution, the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations (Laqua, 2011; Renoliet, 1999). Though education was initially UNESCO’s primary mission (Singh, 2011: 22), culture, particularly heritage, came to assume center stage. Since 1946, the UNESCO General Conference—one of its three governing bodies, together with the Executive Council and the Secretariat—has adopted five heritage-related and one broader culture-related international conventions, ranging from heritage in the event of armed conflict (1954) and the trade of cultural objects (1970) to World Heritage (1972), underwater heritage (2001), intangible heritage (2003), and the promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions (2005).

The World Heritage Convention was adopted against the backdrop of economic modernization, urbanization, and heightened concerns about the attendant risks for heritage preservation. Reflecting the influence of the U.S. NPS (Stott, 2011), the Convention brought together natural and cultural heritage in a single international instrument, though still defining them as separate ontological categories. It came into force in 1975, and in 1977, the World Heritage Committee—an elected body initially composed of representatives of 15 states parties to the treaty—approved Operational Guidelines for its implementation. Unlike the text of the Convention, these Operational Guidelines have been amended on multiple occasions. They stipulated the criteria for the inclusion of cultural sites (six) and natural sites (four) on the World Heritage List. As stipulated in the Convention’s text, decision making on list inscriptions was with the World Heritage Committee, but two expert-based international organizations were mandated with providing evaluations for natural and cultural sites, respectively: the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a forum for governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations, scientists, and business; and ICOMOS, a non-governmental organization based on individual membership and founded in 1965 to diffuse best practices for cultural heritage conservation (Gfeller, 2015). The UNESCO Secretariat assumed the day-to-day management of the Convention. Until the creation of the World Heritage Center in 1992, two different UNESCO Secretariat divisions—the Science Sector and the Culture Sector—carried out this task.

The World Heritage List was established in 1978 with the inaugural inscription of 12 sites. However, at this early stage, the World Heritage Committee was aware that further conceptualization was necessary for this instrument. French conservation architect and future (1981–1987) ICOMOS President Michel Parent was assigned with preparing a memorandum on the Operational Guidelines’ cultural criteria (Parent, 1979). Parent then became the driving force of early discussions on the World Heritage List in the 1980s. In 1983, he urged for forward thinking (Parent, 1983), and under his leadership, ICOMOS subsequently organized a series of meetings devoted to the cultural criteria of the Operational Guidelines and to the question of transnational coordination in World Heritage List inscriptions.

Envisioning the World Heritage List: The path to change

The experts who participated in the 1980s meetings on the World Heritage List shared cultural values and disciplinary backgrounds. They were nearly all European or European-trained conservation architects, art historians, or archaeologists. Consequently, they employed analytical categories derived from European art and architectural traditions, primarily emphasizing aesthetic and historic values in identifying heritage (ICOMOS, 1984). In line with the Eurocentric model predicated on the assumption that the arts flourish in tandem with economic growth, the experts made disparaging comments about the heritage of disadvantaged countries such as Guinea Bissau and the Central African Republic, countries they saw as lacking in heritage of universal value (ICOMOS, 1986). Eurocentrism was not the only facet of these discussions, however: the experts also articulated forward-looking ideas that would subsequently be framed as innovative in the Global Strategy.

One such innovative idea, already expressed in 1984, was the need to widen the scope of the World Heritage List beyond the traditional categories of architectural typology to include broader themes. Parent, among others, proposed the concept of heritage “series” to illustrate the notion of representativeness expressed in several of the Operational Guidelines’ cultural criteria. He defined series using an architectural typology (ICOMOS, 1984). Others, however, also suggested series connected by a concept such as oceanic explorations, the Silk Road, and pilgrimage routes. In so doing, they anticipated the idea of heritage routes first operationalized by the Council of Europe in 1987 and subsequently by UNESCO through such programs as the “Silk Roads” and the “Slave Route,” as well as the 1993 World Heritage List inscription of the Spanish segment of the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage route.

The experts who met in Paris in 1986 to discuss sub-Saharan heritage, moreover, anticipated a central theme of the Global Strategy: the conceptualization of heritage in terms of human relationships to land and space. While discussing specific architectural types, French medievalist Jean Devisse, who had developed an interest in African history during his stay in Senegal around the period of decolonization, insisted that “spatial organization” ought to be the decisive criterion for evaluating sub-Saharan heritage. Devisse thus proposed broadening the assessment of architectural heritage beyond architectural considerations. Jacques Vérité, a French conservation architect, went further by proposing themes such as lakeside habitats—that is, a form of settlement determined by human interaction with water-based natural environments. One or several unnamed participants elaborated on this idea, pleading for World Heritage recognition for the several hundred settlement mounds located in the inland Niger Delta in Mali. They argued that these mounds illustrated 2000 years of iron industry as well as the history of human movement and coexistence with water (ICOMOS, 1986). These three elements anticipated the theme “human coexistence with the land” included in the Global Strategy. Indeed, three of the four components of the 1994 definition were the same: “technological evolution,” “settlement,” and the “movement of peoples” (UNESCO, 1994a). It is conceivable that the idea of a human-land approach was advanced by Wolf Tochtermann, a member of the UNESCO Division of Human Settlements staff, given this division’s focus on the interactions between modes of settlement and natural and socio-cultural contexts. What was thus new was not the discussion of such interactions per se in an international setting (UNESCO, 1981), but rather the formulation of this idea in a heritage context.

In 1988, the World Heritage Committee decided to earmark funds for a “global study” specifically designed to promote the representativeness and completeness of the World Heritage List (UNESCO, 1988b). This was already the rationale that would form the basis for the Global Strategy in 1994. Initially, however, the Global Study followed an even more conservative course than the path charted in earlier ICOMOS discussions. The proposed operational concept was a matrix detailing the relationship between the “history of civilization” and “cultural entities,” defined “in terms of artistic or architectural style, in geographical terms, in terms of a shared religion, etc.” (UNESCO, 1988a). The first element conjured a Western understanding of history as defined by the world’s greatest civilizations—a narrative culminating in the ascendancy and dominance of the West (Ferguson, 2011). In addition, the Global Study proposal only mentioned “historians of art and architecture and archaeologists” to construct and fill the matrix (UNESCO, 1988a). By including a human settlements expert, the 1986 ICOMOS meeting on sub-Saharan heritage hinted at a broader understanding of heritage.

In the early 1990s, a change of personnel in ICOMOS gave new impetus to the Global Study. In 1990, the incumbent Italian ICOMOS president was defeated by a “coalition for change” ¹ led by Canadian conservation architect Herb Stovel. This coalition was intent upon creating “an ICOMOS reaching beyond Europe” to advance conservation activities throughout the world. ² Stovel was elected secretary-general of ICOMOS, and in 1992, he appointed British industrial archaeologist Cleere as ICOMOS World Heritage coordinator. In 1992 and 1993, Cleere authored a series of papers on the Global Study.

While bringing new dynamism to the Global Study, the Cleere/Stovel team advanced both new and existing ideas. In December 1992, ICOMOS and the U.S. and Greek governments presented a joint paper on the Global Study. Its chief operational principle—a three-dimensional grid—was new compared to the two-dimensional matrix advanced in prior Global Study proposals. The idea of a three-dimensional definition, however, had already been raised in 1984 by Norwegian art historian Stephan Tschudi-Madsen (ICOMOS, 1984). The chief of the Preservation Assistance Division in the U.S. NPS, Blaine Cliver, who raised the grid concept in 1992, ³ may not have been aware of this precedent. Yet, the labels proposed in 1992 for the grid axes—“culture (or region), time, and achievement (the type of property)”—were nearly identical to the 1984 proposal—“geo-cultural area,” “time period,” and “type” (Cassimatis et al., 1992; ICOMOS, 1984). The other concept advanced by ICOMOS in 1992 and 1993—“cultural provinces”—was somewhat more innovative. Unlike Parent’s definition of architectural series, “cultural provinces” did not necessarily refer to time- and place-specific art historical developments, but rather to entities transcending national borders and related to an historical period in a particular region, an old civilization, or an artistic movement (Cleere, 1992). Nonetheless, “cultural provinces” were to be defined based on the broad categories used in the historical and art historical disciplines: time, place, and/or aesthetic type.

There was nevertheless one fully novel element in these early 1990s proposals—one that reflected Cleere’s training in industrial archaeology: the emphasis on industrial heritage. The protection of industrial heritage sites had begun to be institutionalized in Britain and North America in the 1960s (Palmer and Neaverson, 1998: 2). By the early 1990s, however, the heritagization of industry in national contexts had not yet translated into widespread international recognition of the value of industrial heritage. Cleere criticized the “double standards” applied by the World Heritage Committee, which readily included cathedrals on the World Heritage List, but was much more hesitant to inscribe industrial sites (Cleere, 1993). Industrial heritage would also be highlighted in the Global Strategy as a heritage form deserving special attention.

An indigenous turn

In June 1994, an expert meeting convened by the UNESCO World Heritage Center and ICOMOS proposed replacing the Global Study with a “new” Global Strategy for a Representative, Balanced and Credible World Heritage List. Consultations undertaken by the World Heritage Center had pointed to the concerns of “some specialists” that the Global Study “might give too much importance to the traditional categories of traditional art history which have developed around the study of the great monuments and great civilizations” (UNESCO, 1993). What prompted the discarding of the Global Study at the June 1994 meeting, however, was that a majority of participants deemed the grid principle to be “too rigid” given its “predetermined categories.” Cleere countered that this concept involved a regular review of the proposed sectorial lists to take account of “changes of attitude.” Others, however, warned against the “danger of fixed patterns,” opting instead for what was perceived and framed as “a flexible framework” (ICOMOS, 1994).

Though the Global Strategy clearly emerged from prior discussions, new actors left a decisive imprint on this action plan. In particular, Joan Domicelj, an expert from the margins of the North in cultural heritage terms—Australia—instigated an indigenous turn in the conceptualization of cultural World Heritage. Australians had played an influential role in World Heritage earlier on, but the focus had been on governance and natural heritage aspects, as opposed to the conceptualization of cultural heritage. Australia hosted the annual meeting of the World Heritage Committee as early as 1981, and prominent Australian ecologist Ralph Slatyer—founding professor in environmental biology at the Australian National University—served as chairman. During his two-year mandate, Slatyer supported the adoption of additional guidelines for the inscription of sites on the list of World Heritage in Danger (Slatyer, 1984: 7; UNESCO, 1982b). He also pushed for the elaboration of monitoring procedures of World Heritage sites (IUCN, 1983; UNESCO, 1983). As a natural scientist, however, he did not seek to influence the definition of cultural World Heritage.

The heritage of indigenous, notably Aboriginal, cultures remained marginal in World Heritage through the early 1990s. Significantly, in the late 1980s, ICOMOS did not assess the indigenous cultural aspects of Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park (Australia) and Tongariro National Park (New Zealand) on the grounds that it lacked the comparative studies required to evaluate them as “a unique heritage of Asia-Pacific cultures.” ⁴ Privately, the ICOMOS World Heritage coordinator raised doubts as to whether Tongariro had “tangible cultural features.” ⁵ Consequently, both were inscribed—respectively in 1987 and 1990—as natural sites only.

In 1994, in contrast, Australian architect and urban design expert Domicelj played a decisive role in broadening the notion of cultural World Heritage to take account of indigenous perceptions. Interestingly, the participation of an Australian was suggested as an afterthought. The initial plan was to invite two experts from each continent, excluding Oceania. ⁶ Cleere, however, proposed extending the group of participants to include “the claims of Australasia and Oceania, with their strong non-monumental culture.” ⁷ This inclusion had a decisive effect on the outcome. It was Domicelj who proposed the theme of “human coexistence with the land.” This theme, in turn, was purposely designed in part to open the World Heritage List to “living,” as opposed to extinct, indigenous cultures (ICOMOS, 1994). Furthermore, two of the sub-themes—“movement of people” and “modes of subsistence”—specifically reflected Domicelj’s contribution (UNESCO, 1994a). At the meeting, she referred to land as a resource for human survival. She also pleaded for amending the Operational Guidelines’ cultural criteria to open the World Heritage List to nomadic indigenous people (ICOMOS, 1994).

Domicelj’s contribution reflected the growing responsiveness of Australian heritage practitioners to indigenous claims. Since the 1970s, indigenous people had become increasingly assertive, demanding control not only over political and economic resources but also over the material record of their past and its interpretation. Tasmanian activist Ros Langford made this point forcefully at the 1982 meeting of the Australian Archaeological Association: “We say that it is our past, our culture and heritage, and forms part of our present life. As such it is ours to control and it is ours to share on our own terms” (Langford, 1983: 2). Central issues in the debate included the repatriation of human remains from museums at home and abroad, custodianship of archaeological sites, and the collusion of archaeology with colonial domination (Murray, 2011: 365). Australian archaeologists moved—some willingly, others reluctantly—toward consultation and collaboration with indigenous community members, giving rise in Australia as in other post-settler states to an “indigenous archaeology” (Atalay, 2006; Nicholas, 2008; Watkins, 2005). In 1983, the annual symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities was devoted to the burning question of “who owns the past” (McBryde, 1985). Australian archaeologist Isabel McBryde, who edited the symposium’s proceedings, pioneered the development of indigenous archaeology in Australia. From 1970 to 1980, she was a member of the New South Wales Aboriginal Relics Advisory Committee (Australian Archaeological Association, 2003), the first such committee in Australia to consult Aboriginal people about archaeological work (Sullivan, 2005: 90). By the 1990s, she had published a series of articles offering thoughts on how to reconcile conflicting views of heritage in the Australian context and expounding the values of Australia’s Aboriginal people (McBryde, 1990, 1995, 1997).

During the 1990s, Domicelj was another important Australian actor seeking solutions to the cultural conflicts originating in diverging and oft-contradictory values held by the descendants of European settlers and Aborigines (Domicelj, 1995: 302). In 1994, she investigated the possibility of applying dispute resolution mechanisms to the clashes arising from differing sets of beliefs among various cultural groups (Domicelj and Marshall, 1994). The proposal embraced all the “cultural contrasts” of a country “actively grappling with its post-colonial identity.” Domicelj nevertheless reckoned that “the most profound concerns lie, perhaps, in the divergence between indigenous and non-indigenous attitudes toward place” (Domicelj and Marshall, 1994: 4).

McBryde in 1992 and Domicelj in 1994 each played an influential role in infusing cultural World Heritage concepts with ideas developed in the post-settler context of Australia. McBryde ensured that the new concept of “cultural landscape” created in 1992 would also reflect indigenous perceptions of the landscape, notably the spiritual values attached to it (Gfeller, 2013: 496–499). Domicelj drew further attention to indigenous heritage by ensuring that it occupies a central position in the all-encompassing Global Strategy.

… and an anthropological turn

The Global Strategy also introduced an anthropological turn in World Heritage. The report advocated “a move away from a purely architectural view of the heritage of humanity towards one which was much more anthropological, multi-functional, and universal.” It strongly recommended updating the World Heritage Convention based on the intellectual debates of the last 20 years. This anthropological vision permeated the discussion of specific themes, notably 20th-century architecture, which received special attention. Specifically, the Global Strategy recommended viewing modern architecture as a testimony to “life in society,” as opposed to assessing only its aesthetic and architectural value (UNESCO, 1994a).

The World Conference on Cultural Policies, held by UNESCO in Mexico City, had already adopted a broad definition of culture in 1982. The Mexico Declaration specifically defined “culture” and “cultural heritage” in anthropological as well as intellectual and artistic terms (Logan, 2007: 36; UNESCO, 1982a). The World Heritage Convention, however, largely remained impervious to these earlier discussions. This disconnect reflected the fact that the Convention was a planet in the orbit of the UNESCO universe, with its own set of rules and institutions. ICOMOS in particular, as the Convention’s main advisory body for cultural heritage, largely perpetuated a traditional definition of heritage shaped by the art historical, archaeological, and architectural disciplines.

The anthropological turn in World Heritage was instigated by Rumanian-born French anthropologist Chiva. Chiva was the prime promoter in France of the concept of “anthropological heritage [patrimoine ethnologique]”—a term coined to designate social and cultural practices, including crafts and techniques (Chiva, 1990; Tornatore, 2004: 149). He had begun his career working as researcher at the French National Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions (Musée national des Arts et Traditions populaires), developing an expertise in French and European rural societies. In the 1980s, he authored several publications and presented frequently on rural architecture (Chiva, 1987a, 1987b; Chiva and Dubost, 1990). From the late 1970s onwards, Chiva also played an instrumental role in a French government project designed to research and highlight the country’s anthropological heritage (Lebovics, 2005). This initiative was intended to address the post-colonial crisis of employment and purpose of French anthropology. It was initially harnessed to President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s efforts to tame regionalist stirrings: anthropologists were charged with counteracting the invention of supposedly fictive historical narratives by rebellious regionalist groups. Not only did Chiva suggest creating a bureau dedicated to anthropological heritage within the newly established heritage office in the French Ministry of Culture—the Mission of Anthropological Heritage (Mission du patrimoine ethnologique) founded in 1980—but from 1984 to 1988, he also acted as vice-president of its governing body, the Council for Anthropological Heritage (Conseil du patrimoine ethnologique).

In line with his disciplinary background and role in promoting anthropological heritage, Chiva pleaded for broadening the notion of cultural “World Heritage” beyond its tangible architectural and archaeological underpinnings. He criticized the Global Study for glossing over intangible elements, particularly “names of places” and “know-hows.” He deplored that “the intellectual field” of the World Heritage Convention had remained limited to “material” and “monumental” aspects. Most important, he voiced qualms not only about the Convention’s “elitist” bias—in line with his scholarly work on rural societies—but also about the dominant influence of art history and archaeology at the expense of an ethnographic approach (ICOMOS, 1994). These comments were consonant with Chiva’s 1990 criticisms of the General Inventory of the Monuments and Art Treasures of France (Inventaire général des monuments et des richesses artistiques de la France) (Heinich, 2009), which he viewed as overly focused on tangible, structural elements at the expense of social and cultural features (Chiva and Dubost, 1990: 20–21). Chiva believed that vernacular architecture could only be studied by considering both its “material” and its “social and mental” dimensions (Chiva, 1987b: 5).

Interestingly, Chiva’s decisive participation in the June 1994 meeting was due both to his work on rural architecture and anthropological heritage and probably to personal connections. During the 1960s and 1970s, he had worked closely with famous structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, from whom the UNESCO Secretariat’s Social Sciences Sector had already commissioned studies on race, culture, and ethnocentrism (Eriksen, 2001: 363–366; Lévi-Strauss, 1952, 2001 [1971]). From 1962 to 1982, Chiva directed the Laboratory of Social Anthropology created by Lévi-Strauss at the Collège de France (Bromberger and Zonabend, 2012). In 1992, Laurent Lévi-Strauss, Claude’s son, joined the UNESCO World Heritage Center and was subsequently put in charge of co-organizing the June 1994 meeting with ICOMOS. It is plausible that Lévi-Strauss junior suggested Chiva’s participation in the meeting.

In addition to these conceptual proposals on indigenous cultures and an anthropological understanding of heritage, the Global Strategy recommended amendments to the Operational Guidelines’ cultural criteria (UNESCO, 1994a). Although these changes were specifically designed to make the World Heritage List less Eurocentric, they were also primarily advanced by actors from the North. It was the Australian Domicelj who suggested changing the wording of two criteria (iii and v) in order to open them to “living traditions,” notably the heritage of Australia’s nomadic people (ICOMOS, 1994). In the 1994 version of the Operational Guidelines, these two criteria still referred to traditions that were either on the verge of disappearance or extinct, excluding living, particularly indigenous cultures (UNESCO, 1994b). Maria Dolores de Almeida Cunha, an official from the Division of Intellectual Co-operation of the Brazilian Foreign Ministry, made one further suggestion. The French “chef d’oeuvre” (masterpiece), she argued, had a broader meaning than the English “unique artistic achievement” (ICOMOS, 1994). The resulting proposal to remove the latter phrase from criterion (i), however, merely brought the English text in line with the French. Moreover, there is no evidence in the meeting notes of who may have made the important suggestion of rephrasing yet another criterion (ii) to suggest that cultural influences can be bidirectional rather than unidirectional—a change aimed at remedying the perceived Eurocentric bias of this criterion (UNESCO, 1994a).

Obviously, Domicelj and Chiva were not the only contributors to the Global Strategy. Acting as chair, the Canadian Cameron—director-general of National Historic Sites at Parks Canada—successfully geared the meeting toward a tangible outcome. ⁸ Based on archival evidence, her primary contribution was to ensure that the discussions would lead to operational decisions. Cameron initially set the agenda, urging every participant to think about the “purpose of this meeting and the expected results.” In the course of the discussions, she provided summaries and repeatedly asked questions designed to facilitate the decision-making process. Though as chair she remained above the fray, she insisted that the text of the Convention was less restrictive than the Operational Guidelines, providing much room for “change” (ICOMOS, 1994). UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre founding Director Bernd von Droste was also influential to the extent that he supported and ensured the implementation of the plan to hold this expert meeting. ⁹ During the meeting itself, von Droste specifically insisted on drawing more on the “scientific community,” which then formed part of the Global Strategy’s recommendations (ICOMOS, 1994).

North-North dynamics

The Global Strategy has come to be viewed as a watershed because it was constructed as such in 1994 and because of subsequent statements by the UNESCO World Heritage Center. In truth, as evidenced from this analysis of prior discussions on the World Heritage List, the origins of the Global Strategy show how ideas fall in and out of favour and are continuously recycled in the world of international organizations. Several of its central features—the idea of series based on broad themes such as pilgrimage and trade routes, the conceptualization of heritage in terms of human coexistence with the land, the very rationale of improving the list’s representativeness, and the emphasis on industrial heritage—had already been discussed in the 1980s or early 1990s. The important novelty in 1994 was the influence of new actors in geographical (Australia) or disciplinary (anthropology) terms with respect to the definition of cultural World Heritage, albeit actors still solidly anchored in the North. Although anthropologists (Bortolotto, 2007: 40, 2011: 22–23; Brumann, 2014: 2180) and practitioners (Cameron and Rössler, 2013: 83) have noted this anthropologization of heritage, the reasons for such a shift had not been elucidated. This study shows that it flowed from deliberate efforts by anthropologists to assert their influence in World Heritage. It also suggests the need to refine the claim that the notion of what qualifies as World Heritage evolved in response to “challenges to the broadly Euro-American model of heritage” of the Convention, “as attempts were made to apply this model globally to people and places with radically different models of heritage” (Harrison, 2013: 139). The Global Strategy’s emphasis on non-monumental indigenous heritage did not quite result from attempts to apply this model to Oceania’s indigenous people. Rather, it internationalized an agenda developed by Australians of European descent to address indigenous claims. Thus, there was one intermediary layer complicating this narrative.

The Global Strategy was adopted in the context of a series of conceptual reforms in World Heritage. The criteria for “cultural landscapes” approved by the World Heritage Committee in 1992 were designed to bridge the traditional divide between “culture” and “nature”—two concepts that the World Heritage Convention had failed to bridge in practice. In November 1994, 45 experts meeting at Nara (Japan) signed a declaration introducing the notion of cultural relativism into the assessment of heritage authenticity: the Nara Document on Authenticity. The “test of authenticity”—enshrined in the Operational Guidelines and to which all cultural nominations were subjected—privileged values deeply rooted in European conservation theory. The Nara Document, in contrast, recognized that “all judgments about values attributed to cultural properties,” including authenticity, might “differ from culture to culture” (Nara Conference on Authenticity, 1994).

These three reforms were interrelated. The introduction of cultural landscapes paved the way for the broader conceptual shift of the Global Strategy by introducing two circumscribed conceptual changes: the discarding of the culture/nature divide and, through the sub-category of associative cultural landscape, a limited emphasis on indigenous cultures. Significantly, von Droste specifically referred to cultural landscapes during the June 1994 meeting as one step already taken to fill in the gaps on the World Heritage List (ICOMOS, 1994). The Global Strategy, in turn, likely influenced the outcome of the subsequent Nara meeting to the extent that a more “representative” and “balanced” World Heritage List could only be achieved if the Eurocentric underpinnings of the “test of authenticity” were undermined.

Interestingly, all three reforms followed a similar pattern: actors from post-settler states played a decisive role. The Australian Domicelj and the Canadian Cameron each played an influential role in shaping the Global Strategy. The cultural landscape agenda was advanced by a coalition of actors, including experts from post-settler states (Canada, the United States, and Australia) (Gfeller, 2013). The Nara Conference on Authenticity may have been hosted by the Japanese government in the context of Japan’s belated ratification of the World Heritage Convention in 1992—the Japanese worried that their cultural sites would not pass the Eurocentric “test of authenticity”—yet, the main inspirational figure behind it and the Nara Document on Authenticity was the Canadian Stovel, another representative from a post-settler state. ¹⁰ These reforms can thus be viewed as an attempt by the North’s internal periphery (the post-settler world) to displace the long-held hegemony of its center (Europe) in heritage matters.

The Global Strategy had mixed results and assessments. It favored the World Heritage inscription of a much wider range of heritage types including vernacular and 20th-century architecture, industrial heritage, trade and pilgrimage routes, canals (Gfeller and Eisenberg, in print), and railway roads as well as heritage sites associated with negative events in human history. Northern states, however, were quicker than others to make use of these new heritage categories (UNESCO Office of the External Auditor, 2011: 24–25). Twenty years after the adoption of the Global Strategy, Europe and North America still account for 48% of all World Heritage sites (480 out of 1007) (UNESCO, 2015), against 52% in 1994 (166 out of 320) (Cleere, 1994). This outcome substantiates Tsing’s claim that scholars must explore “globalist projects and dreams without assuming that they remake the world just as they want” (Tsing, 2000: 330). One oft-mentioned explanation for this standstill is the disproportion in resources—financial, administrative, and technical—between the North and the South (Brumann, 2014: 2179; Labadi, 2005: 93). Inscriptions on the World Heritage List are a great expense, with a nomination file easily costing six or seven figures in U.S. dollars and requiring the assembling of massive documentation. When states lack expertise in heritage policy and sometimes fail to have an appropriate bureaucratic structure, the task is daunting (UNESCO Office of the External Auditor, 2011: 26–27). The 2011 external audit on the Global Strategy also pointed to the increasing politicization of Committee decisions on nominations and the growing gap between such decisions and the opinions formulated by the expert organizations tasked with this mission—ICOMOS and IUCN (UNESCO Office of the External Auditor, 2011: 39–40). Such disregard for expert opinions has gone unabated since 2011, although some (Brumann, 2014: 2184–2185; Meskell, 2012: 149–150, 2013: 489) but not all (Logan, 2012: 124–125) scholarly observers have suggested that such behavior could be interpreted as an attempt by the South to overrule the hegemony of the North based on an enduring perception of ICOMOS as a primarily Eurocentric organization.

All that said, the 2011 audit, which included 26 recommendations, also mentioned a number of shortcomings that complicate the assessment of the Global Strategy, including diverging interpretations of the notion of “outstanding universal value,” the lack of “adapted monitoring tools,” and the reduction of the notions of balance and representativity to “a simplistic statistical approach by ‘world heritage’ numbers and zones”—to name but three examples. The audit recommended in particular establishing more relevant statistics by sub-region—as opposed to the “arbitrary” division in five large zones: “Europe and North America,” for instance, extend beyond the Urals to encompass the far eastern part of the Russian federation while also including Israel, Turkey, and the sub-tropical islands and territories attached to France, Portugal, and Spain. The audit also advocated going beyond the approach based on political units in order to devise “scientific analytical grids” to be drawn by ICOMOS and IUCN (UNESCO Office of the External Auditor, 2011: 8–13). This assessment shows that some three decades after the initial experts discussions, the debate goes on because the very topic of a representative World Heritage List is so complex. It also suggests that although the analysis and the proposed solutions have become increasingly more sophisticated over time, old ideas die hard: after being dismissed in 1994, the grid concept of the Global Study made a brief comeback in 2011.