World heritage and inter/national cultural prestige

Elif Kalaycioglu discusses the key arguments from her new Review of International Studies (RIS) article. If you’d like to know more, you can read the full article here – World heritage and inter/national cultural prestige

UNESCO’s world heritage regime has become the organisation’s flagship programme, if not a household name. Analysing states’ engagement with the regime, a body of mostly interdisciplinary scholarship has suggested that states seek national prestige through world heritage, in contradiction to its cosmopolitan ethos. 

In this article, I argue that states’ engagement with world heritage involves the quest for a distinctly international form of cultural prestige that the regime generates. World heritage generates international cultural prestige around the idea of humanity’s heritage, defined as more valuable than the sum of all nationally important heritage. My analysis illustrates how through humanity, states make claims to international cultural prestige as: custodians of, geographic homes, or contributors to humanity’s universally valuable cultural treasures. 

Prestige: cultural and international

Important IR work has shown that states pursue symbolic capital, status and prestige. Prestige, which is at the crux of my article, is defined as intersubjectively shared ideas about qualities that merit admiration. This definition has generated debates on whether and how such shared understanding is possible in global politics. 

My analytical framework builds on Bourdieu’s approach to fields, and particularly the cultural field. Key to Bourdeusian fields are: relative autonomy, doxa, and field capital. 

• Relative autonomy means that different fields, such as culture and economy, operate according to their own logics. They generate their own forms of prestige, and participants need to play the field’s game to obtain that prestige.
• Doxa is the foundational logic that allows fields to emerge as autonomous in the first place.
• And finally, fields have their own evaluative mechanisms and authorities. These mechanisms are integral to how fields generate their own capital and prestige.

The doxa of the cultural field is art for art’s sake. It separates the cultural field from others, such as the economic field. Art, in other words, is not evaluated on the basis of its commercial value. To the contrary, that commercial logic can devalue cultural productions. Instead, art institutions and critics evaluate artwork based on field-specific matrices. These evaluations generate cultural capital and prestige. 

Importantly, Bourdieu developed his framework at the domestic level, and we need to take a further step when thinking about international fields. Here, a “vertical separation” enters the fray: If the cultural field is horizontally separated from other fields, the international cultural field is also vertically separated from national cultural fields. It exists with its own evaluative mechanisms. 

World heritage as an international field

I approach world heritage as an international cultural field with humanity as its doxa. The World Heritage Convention’s preamble writes that some elements of cultural and natural heritage are ‘of outstanding interest’ and ‘need to be preserved as part of the World Heritage of mankind as a whole.’

This doxa generates the regime’s evaluative matrices and figures. The outstanding interest is codified as ‘outstanding universal value,’ (‘OUV’) necessary for a site to qualify as world heritage. International experts are authorised to make judgments on OUV.

Thus, the field allows for the generation of international cultural prestige, as different from and greater than national cultural prestige. To illustrate, OUV is defined as ‘cultural and/or natural significance which is so exceptional as to transcend national boundaries and to be of common importance for present and future generations of all humanity.’ In other words, these sites have more-than-national value. 

And yet, this international cultural prestige is up for national grab. States, and only states, have the right to nominate sites within their territorial boundaries as world heritage. Further, in its default view, the virtual World Heritage List (‘WHL’) lists states in alphabetical order, with ‘their’ sites underneath.

(Not just) our heritage

Having identified the doxic role of humanity, I analyse the speeches states give after the sites they nominate are placed on the WHL. My analysis illustrates that states invoke humanity in ways that correspond to its doxic role: they reproduce the idea that there is such a thing as heritage of humanity, and that this heritage is one of distinction and prestige. 

At the same time, the speeches position states in relation to this international prestige. I identify three such positionings:

1. Custodial: states position themselves as protectors and preservers of humanity’s heritage. They claim prestige as responsible custodians of humanity’s treasures.
2. Geographical homes to humanity’s heritage: The sites are acknowledged as at once national, and also bearers of more-than-national value. For example: [Liangzhu] is ‘not only the cultural treasure of China’ but ‘also the common cultural heritage of all mankind,’ or ‘The gardens has always been well loved and cherished by Singaporeans. And now we are very proud to have it recognised as a site worthy of exceptional value for humanity.’
3. Contributors to humanity’s heritage: This positioning involves stronger articulations of prestige for having contributed to humanity’s heritage. For example: ‘‘our tombstones… enrich the rich treasury of cultural heritage of all humanity” or “‘industrial heritage of humanity’, made possible by the combination of international know-how and Iranian knowledge.” 

Through humanity, then, states position their national selves as generators and possessors of more-than-national cultural value.

An unsettled field 

Since 2010, this quest for international cultural prestige has taken on a new tenor. States have proven willing to overturn negative expert evaluations and exert political pressure to have their sites placed on the WHL.

However, these engagements challenge the very possibility of the prestige states seek: they risk transforming world heritage from an international cultural field to a national-political one. 

Crucially, my analysis points to awareness of this tension on the part of state delegations. While they practically undermine the field’s autonomy as international and cultural, states seek to discursively reconstruct it.  67/191 speeches from the post-2010 period mention humanity. These mentions keep humanity in circulation as foundational to the field, and attach it to the more-than-national cultural distinction that states continue to seek—and at the same time jeopardise.

Final Takeaways

• The article extends recent work on international cultural fields, which suggests that the pursuit of cultural prestige can present a unique set of challenges for states.
• In placing equal emphasis on the cultural and international elements of world heritage prestige, I illustrate the construction of the international as a more-than-national stage. My analysis, which shows that humanity remains in circulation even at a time of assertion of national wills, points to a fraught configuration where states desire, practically undermine, and seek to discursively reconstruct that more-than-national stage, including for its prestige stakes.
• As the dynamics that course through world heritage, such as the assertion of state prerogatives alongside continued institutional engagement, are more broadly at work in contemporary global politics, the analysis can shed light on negotiations that unfold in other global governance realms, pointing to unexpected and fraught sources of institutional endurance.

Want to know more? You can read the full article at DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021052510096X

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