Archaeological Ruins of Liangzhu City became a world heritage site in 2019. As customary, once the site was placed – or in the field’s parlance inscribed – on the World Heritage List (‘WHL’), the nominating state delegation took the floor for brief remarks. The first speaker described Liangzhu as ‘witness to China’s 5000 years of civilization’, now vividly displayed to the world.Footnote 1 This articulation suggests that China (mis)understands world heritage as a mechanism for the international projection of its national identity. In fact, a body of mostly interdisciplinary scholarship has suggested that, especially since 2010, states engage with UNESCO’s flagship programme to seek national prestige, in contradiction to its cosmopolitan ethos.Footnote 2 That ethos, articulated in the World Heritage Convention’s Preamble, is that some elements of cultural heritage are ‘of outstanding interest’ and thus ‘need to be preserved as part of the World Heritage of mankind as a whole’.Footnote 3 The ethos, then, assumes that mankind, or in the since-revised language humankind, shares a cultural history. The field’s task is to identify, preserve, and promote the material manifestations of this cultural history by placing them on the WHL if they are deemed to possess the requisite ‘outstanding universal value’ (‘OUV’). What violates this ethos is the nomination of sites that are valuable for states’ national identities or the insistence on site inscriptions despite negative expert evaluations.
Returning to the meeting floor, a second speaker remarked that the site was ‘not only the cultural treasure of China’ but ‘also the common cultural heritage of all mankind’.Footnote 4 The grammatical structure of ‘not only…but also’ communicates a hierarchy with mankind standing above China. Given the first articulation and scholarly observations, we might be tempted to lean into the mainstream International Relations (IR) common sense: this is an instance of states pursuing their self-interest while paying lip service to norms, in this case, a cosmopolitan ethos. And yet, why pay that lip service when the site has already been added to the List, and thus the state has already successfully pursued its interest? Nor is China’s invocation of humanity a unique case. Invocations of humanity recur in these speeches, in ways that are surprising at a time of the field’s fractious implementation amid the assertion of state wills. If so, interpretivist and social constructivist approaches that apprehend states’ enunciations as sites of meaning-making can provide us with further traction in understanding these unexpected invocations.Footnote 5 The question, then, becomes what these recurrent invocations of humanity produce.
To answer that question, I lean into a Bourdieusian reading of world heritage. I propose, first, that humanity plays a doxic role in bounding world heritage as a field of cultural distinction. As doxa, humanity sets world heritage apart from and above other forms of valued cultural heritage, such as national heritage. In doing so, humanity is generative of the evaluative matrix of OUV. It is the answer to the question: in relation to whom are these sites universally valuable?Footnote 6 What is at stake is the generation of more-than-national cultural prestige, which is highly desired by states. Second, the field’s relative autonomy, which combines elements of expert evaluation with the right of states to nominate sites within their boundaries, makes possible both the consecration of this international cultural value and also its national pursuit. The field’s functioning consecrates cultural sites, which are always bearers of particular social-historical moments and meanings, as possessors of objective-universal cultural value. In doing so, world heritage endows nationally valued sites with more-than-national value. Third, turning to their post-inscription speeches, I illustrate states’ awareness of and investment in this form of international cultural prestige. These dynamics, then, generate a bind whereby states’ desire for and pursuit of this more-than-national prestige can risk its construction. In fact, this is precisely what has been unfolding since the 2010 critical juncture, with insistence on site inscriptions despite negative expert evaluations. And yet, despite greater assertions of state prerogatives, the invocations of humanity endure. We can, I suggest, make sense of this persistence in light of the doxic role humanity plays in the generation of this field and its dispensation of more-than-national value. Fourth and finally, I identify another, and unattended, development, namely, a discursive reinterpretation of humanity-as-states, at once illustrating and undermining the doxa’s distinction function.
The article makes a few contributions. It follows and 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 point to 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. Insofar 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. Finally, bringing a field frame to bear upon world heritage, the article makes new analytical sense of some of the dynamics that the interdisciplinary scholarship has attended to as hypocritical, namely, why states continue to invoke humanity.
The article proceeds as follows. First, I review the IR scholarship on prestige and turn to Bourdieu’s work to push further with the analysis of international and cultural prestige. Second, I analyse the genesis of world heritage to trace the establishment of humanity as its doxa, bounding the field as separate from national cultural heritage and staking that separation with a normative valence. I show how that logic has carried through in texts that govern the field’s functioning. Third, I point to how states acknowledge and take up that distinction function. Fourth, I apprehend 2010 as a critical juncture that threatened field autonomy, and its aftermath as illustrating attempts at its partial recovery. Fifth, I ask what this means for the field’s doxa and conclude by observing that while not upended, it is renegotiated via a frame of states-as-humanity.
Prestige in IR
Important IR work has shown that states pursue not only economic or military but also symbolic capital.Footnote 7 In a similar vein, a growing body of IR scholarship has been analysing states’ pursuits of status and prestige.Footnote 8 Importantly, while status has received greater scholarly attention, status and prestige are integrally connected. In their field-defining edited volume, Larson et al. note that ‘prestige is acquired by being superior on an evaluative dimension’, whereas ‘status refers to a ranking on a hierarchy’.Footnote 9 Similarly, Musgrave and Nexon describe status hierarchies as ‘stratified by rankings of honor and prestige’.Footnote 10 Thus, status – as rankings on attributes evaluated in a positive valence – implies prestige, which is this article’s focus.Footnote 11
Prestige is regularly defined as intersubjectively shared ideas about qualities that merit respect and admiration.Footnote 12 This definition raises the question of how such intersubjectivity is possible in global politics, that is, how can states agree on a prestige object or attribute? Lilach Gilady answers that shared understandings of prestige emerge when objects are consumed by the right actors as a symbol of their distinction and perceived as such by the audience.Footnote 13 Others query whether intersubjective understandings of prestige are possible in global politics. In Vincent Pouliot’s rendering, lacking a symbolic hegemon, international status competition is ‘not only about how much status one country has, but also about what status is in the first place’.Footnote 14 Jonathan Mercer’s sceptical take proposes that prestige is an illusion, which rests not on shared meanings duly recognised by the relevant community, but on states’ confusion of pride with prestige. The task is to reveal the illusion and disabuse policymakers of it.Footnote 15 However, Mercer’s tack underestimates how prestige fields compel participation, even when the illusion might not hold. As Pouliot points out, states take part in the status game, even as they disagree on its precise meaning and measures.
Implicit in Gilady’s and Pouliot’s conceptions is another divergence regarding how shared notions of prestige can emerge in global politics. Following Gilady, we might understand signalling by leading states to be adequate in generating that shared understanding.Footnote 16 And yet it can be hard for those states to establish their conceptions as broadly applicable and legitimate. In contrast, Pouliot’s analysis centres on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) as a site that is intersubjectively understood to have status stakes. Similarly, Paul Beaumont argues that international rankings limit states’ ability to generate rival status theories by ‘systematically measuring and quantifying hitherto private and diffuse practices in order to generate equivalence and render performance comparable’.Footnote 17 For both scholars, international institutions act as focal points that converge international status pursuits and are reproduced as such via states’ discursive and practical engagements.Footnote 18 In Beaumont’s rendering, that convergence also entails a narrowed meaning of status. Others have pointed to how indexes generate legitimacy in relation to international prestige and status, drawing on the position of international institutions and experts as impartial, apolitical, scientific-technical sites and figures.Footnote 19 These infrastructures, crucially, point to a different construction of international prestige, with a degree of detachment from states and understood as legitimate in that detachment.
If the foregoing suggests that leading states might not always be the right actors for the construction of prestige, or that intervening mechanisms might be necessary to produce their conceptions as international-objective matrices, Joseph MacKay’s recent work on art-world fields brings in a further complication. Building on Bourdieu’s approach to the cultural field as defined in its (relative) autonomy from the political and economic fields, MacKay contends that if states push too hard in their pursuit of cultural prestige, they can jeopardise its very possibility, since their accomplishment will be understood as illustrating political or economic rather than cultural acumen.Footnote 20 At best, then, there is no immediate translation between being a leading state in political or economic terms and cultural prestige. For example, Hollywood produces films that are commercially successful but not necessarily prestigious, a distinction that is attached rather to French cinema. To extend these insights on the construction and pursuit of international cultural prestige, I also turn to Bourdieu’s frames.
Cultural prestige beyond IR
Culture is frequently mentioned as a source of international prestige and status, but it is rarely the subject of further theoretical and empirical investigation, or it is assumed to involve international projections of national culture.Footnote 21 These projections, however, exist alongside another mode of constructing international cultural prestige, the potency of which can be apprehended via Bourdieusian frames.Footnote 22
Bourdieu’s approach to culture is part of his broader theoretical infrastructure, which defines fields as social spaces of relative autonomy.Footnote 23 Relative autonomy refers to the relation between fields, such as culture and economy. The autonomy between and sociality within fields are rendered through the key concepts of doxa, evaluative mechanisms and institutions, and field-specific capital.Footnote 24 Together, these elements construct the field as a space with its own form of capital, such as cultural or economic, pursued according to its own logic, and consecrated by the relevant actors and institutions. Fields are competitive spaces, with which participants engage strategically to maximise their position and accrue field capital.Footnote 25 Crucially, such engagement unfolds through the field’s terms – in other words, participants play the field’s game.Footnote 26 We can now turn to what these elements mean in relation to the cultural field.
Doxa is the foundational logic that allows fields to emerge as relatively autonomous social spaces.Footnote 27 Bourdieu observes in mid-19th century France the emergence of a cultural field in its separation from the economic and political fields.Footnote 28 The separation is produced via the doxa art pour l’art, that is, art for art’s sake.Footnote 29 This logic means that cultural production is not, and should not be, guided by economic and political logics, such as aspirations to financial gain.Footnote 30 Doxa, then, makes and maintains the field, separating it from other fields, and endowing that separation with a normative valence – art should be for art’s sake, and not driven by other, lesser logics. Doxa is held as the field’s truth, the questioning of which puts its autonomy at risk.
The doxa is generative of the field’s evaluative mechanisms and distinct capital.Footnote 31 The cultural field’s evaluative mechanism is ‘disinterestedness’.Footnote 32 Commercially oriented artistic production can accrue its creators economic capital, but its economic entanglement and corresponding lack of disinterestedness can jeopardise cultural capital and distinction – blockbuster Hollywood movies might lack the prestige of French films.Footnote 33 Bound to distinct logics, these forms of capital are not easily convertible.Footnote 34 The nouveaux riche might become able to enter exclusive galleries but still lack the cultural capital of aristocratic families who walk around the gallery with ease, competently discoursing on art appreciation.Footnote 35 Scaling up, MacKay observes that Abu Dhabi’s efforts to convert economic to cultural capital by rapidly purchasing art works is limited by and thus illustrative of these logics.Footnote 36 Further, these field-specific evaluative matrices become solidified in institutions. Museums, art galleries, and figures like art critics consecrate certain materialities as objets d’art and not, for example, a pile of bricks, and dispense field capital.Footnote 37 Unlike the doxa, which assumes that there is something to be consecrated as art, evaluative mechanisms on what is to be consecrated, on what bases, and by whom (can) remain contested.Footnote 38
I have so far emphasised how the doxa, evaluative criteria, and institutions hang together to produce fields as relatively autonomous social spaces that generate their own form of capital and distinction. However, there are further critical layers to Bourdieu’s theoretical artifice. First, the doxa hides the field’s conditions of possibility. Art for art’s sake recedes from view the infrastructures that make cultural production and consecration possible, directing attention instead to individual aesthetic genius.Footnote 39 Second, and related, that occlusion assists in transforming historical-social contingencies into objective-cultural value consecrations. What is consecrated stops being a reflection of these iterative practices and becomes recognition of objective artistic genius and value. Bourdieu’s work on cultural distinction, which travels through education, is a key illustration of this second dynamic. Here, education intervenes between aristocratic habitus and what is consecrated as high culture.Footnote 40 Curricula valorise forms of art (appreciation) congruent with the habitus of upper-class families. Via a national education system, grounded in its own doxa of individual merit, education contributes to the reconfiguration of these art forms and their appreciation, from social-historical artefacts to possessors of objective-cultural value. Students brought up in families that cultivate these tastes encounter the curricula with the cultural capital necessary to excel, whereas others fall behind. At the end of this process, their cultural habitus faces some students as objectively valuable forms of distinction. In other words, the relatively autonomous field of education intervenes between social class and cultural distinction to render the socio-historical objective-universal.Footnote 41
Finally, it is important to note that Bourdieu developed his theoretical corpus at the domestic level. Agenda-setting IR scholarship has demonstrated the relevance of Bourdieusian concepts to analyses of global politics.Footnote 42 Beyond IR, sociologist Larissa Buchholz notes that the transposition of the field concept to global politics requires supplementing functional differentiation with vertical separation.Footnote 43 For Buchholz, this vertical separation is necessary for the existence of an international art field as separate from (the sum total of) various national art fields. That international field, in turn, is attached to the vision of global art, discursively constructed in relevant journals and generative of global artist indexes. Buchholz apprehends this vertical separation as one of relative autonomy, with different levels of proximity to national fields. MacKay similarly argues that the international art field is homologous to the American one, affording the state smoother prestige pursuits.Footnote 44 In extending this work, I bring attention to states’ fraught pursuits of international cultural prestige, whereby they practically undermine and seek to discursively uphold the autonomy elemental to it. I also underline the normative valence of that vertical separation, rejected by Buchholz and not attended to by MacKay. Here, I follow Sending, who tracks the construction of the ‘international’ as a field in its separation from the sum total of national interests, with the latter understood as provincial in relation to the former.Footnote 45 I also understand this vertical separation as scalar and normative – it designates international cultural value as separate from and more than (the sum total of all) national cultural value. This normative valence makes that prestige highly desirable and renders its pursuit more fraught.
In the following analysis, I apprehend world heritage as a field, with humanity as the doxa that generates a normatively inflected vertical separation. The regime’s evaluative matrices (OUV) and figures (international experts) evidence a mix of vertical and functional separation. When the field functions smoothly, it generates a distinctly international form of cultural prestige at the intersection of this dual distinction. At the same time, this prestige is left up for national grabs, with a configuration of relative autonomy that allows states to nominate sites. In turn, the assertion of political logics can jeopardise both forms of autonomy, with the process becoming reduced to consecrations of subjective-cultural value that is demonstrative of political acumen. The following analysis shows how these elements hang together, their unsettlement by a critical juncture, and their partial reconstruction, illustrating the fraught desires for international cultural prestige.
The analytical approach
My analytical approach is theoretically informed. I begin from the field’s genesis, as these are moments when field logics and evaluative infrastructures are established.Footnote 46 I focus on the two preparatory meetings, an initial Draft Convention and the adopted World Heritage Convention.Footnote 47 I identify the doxic role that humanity plays in separating the field from cultural heritage at large and endowing that separation with distinction. I extend this analysis to the field’s Operational Guidelines to show the endurance of this element.
My illustration of states’ doxic uptake relies on post-inscription speeches. These speeches, like the opening example, are delivered by states after a site has been added to the WHL. They last around two minutes. The audience is primarily one of peers but also includes UNESCO officials, international experts, civil society organisations, and researchers who attend the annual World Heritage Committee Meetings, which take the field’s implementing decisions.Footnote 48 Since 2012, that audience has further expanded with the live streaming of the meetings, with recordings also available thereafter. Combing through the reports and online recordings of annual World Heritage Committee meetings up to 2022 yields 358 records of some post-inscription remark and 236 verbatim speeches, 191 of which are from 2010 onwards.Footnote 49
Once again, my approach to these speeches is theoretically informed. Bourdieu uses illusio to refer to participants’ uptake of field doxa.Footnote 50 He allows for this uptake to be internalised or reflective.Footnote 51 Similarly, some IR engagements have emphasised a more or less conscious ‘practical sense’, whereas others point to articulate engagements with fields.Footnote 52 In reading these speeches, I do not ask whether they are genuine or instrumental forms of speech – a differentiation that would be hard to maintain given my claim that humanity is entangled with cultural distinction. What matters to my analysis is what is noted by Bourdieu himself as well as his transpositions to IR, that both forms of engagement reproduce the field’s stakes. I also recognise the theoretical challenge of parsing a doxic uptake, namely, that it is supposed to be taken for granted. For example, we would not expect all cultural production to reiterate that it is art for art’s sake. Understood as such, invocations of humanity can be a sign of doxic uptake as much as unsettlement. Or, I propose, they can emerge in a time of unsettlement and illustrate the continued need for the doxa. In asking if and how states invoke humanity in their world heritage pursuits, I analyse the speeches with an eye to this illustrative function.
In following this analytical path, I do not parse which countries invoke humanity or ask whether humanity is invoked in relation to particular kinds of sites. Most states which have multiple full-text speeches recorded invoke humanity in some instances and not in others. And if sites especially valuable to national identities might seem like an obvious candidate for non-invocations, that assumption is challenged by some of the following examples, where speeches express pride in precisely those sites and stories becoming the shared heritage of humanity.Footnote 53 While both questions are worthwhile in furthering our understanding of states’ pursuit of international cultural heritage, they are beyond the focus of this article.
Humanity’s more-than-national heritage
We can locate the genesis of world heritage in UNESCO’s campaign (1960–80) to safeguard the ancient Nubian monuments in Egypt and Sudan from being inundated by the Aswan High Dam.Footnote 54 Launching the safeguarding campaign, Director General Vittorino Veronese emphasised that the monuments were ‘part of the patrimony of all mankind and of Egypt’ as ‘treasures of universal value’.Footnote 55 Initiating the next stage of the campaign, Veronese’s successor René Maheu remarked that these monuments were the ‘glory of [man’s] past’, and their preservation of ‘benefit to the whole of mankind’.Footnote 56 These framing articulations set forth two elements that would be integral to the field of world heritage. First is the logic of ‘the patrimony of mankind’. What this logic implies is nothing less than the possibility that humanity shares a cultural history. Second, humanity and universal value are tethered together. Universal value is an evaluative matrix that emerges in relation to humanity’s heritage, and humanity answers the question: universally valuable for/in relation to whom? In holding universal value, some cultural sites transcend their temporal and geographic contexts of production and valorisation and become valuable for humanity across time and place.
As the Nubian campaign was still underway, in 1966, UNESCO’s General Assembly adopted Resolution 3.3411. The Resolution authorised the Director General to initiate work towards an international protection system for ‘a few of the monuments that form an integral part of the cultural heritage of mankind’, which the attendant work plan defined as ‘monuments and sites of universal interest’.Footnote 57 Communicating the idea for a (global governance) field, the Resolution turned to the logic of humanity’s heritage and the evaluative frame of universal value. Two preparatory expert meetings were convened to discuss the desirability and feasibility of this international mechanism.Footnote 58 The conclusions of the meetings were shared with UNESCO’s General Assembly, which authorised the institution with the formulation of a Draft Convention.
The first expert meeting concluded that international assistance would be limited to sites that ‘as fundamental elements of the cultural heritage of mankind, are of truly universal value’.Footnote 59 The meeting’s conclusion remarked that ‘international protection implies the existence of something more than the sum of all that is nationally important i.e. the existence of certain items of universal importance’ and reported ‘renewed confidence’ to save ‘masterpieces whose fate concerns all men’.Footnote 60 A background paper submitted to the second meeting illustrated the need for an international mechanism by pointing to the world community’s reactions to the perils faced by sites such as ‘Warsaw’s historic centre or Florence’s frescoes’, which ‘[have] as great a value for mankind’ as they do to conservators.Footnote 61 UNESCO’s General Assembly, which discussed the conclusions of the expert meetings, expressed concern about instances when national attention might be directed to ‘monuments they prefer for reasons of sentiment’, and when qualifying sites might not receive national attention for ‘political or religious reasons’.Footnote 62 Finally, the Preamble to the Draft Convention noted that, while the loss of ‘any item of cultural property’ is ‘a harmful impoverishment of the heritage of all the nations of the world’, sites of ‘exceptional interest’ and ‘universal value’ would ‘be preserved as part of the world heritage of mankind as a whole’.Footnote 63 These preparatory meetings, then, similarly conceived of humanity as a mark of distinction in relation to cultural heritage, articulated universal value as the measure of that distinction, and juxtaposed this universally valuable heritage of humanity to nationally valorised heritage.
Adopted in 1972, the Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage (‘World Heritage Convention’) established the field of world heritage. The Convention’s Preamble writes that some elements of cultural and natural heritage are ‘of outstanding interest’ and therefore ‘need to be preserved as part of the World Heritage of mankind as a whole’.Footnote 64 Once again, this category of world heritage is juxtaposed to the totality of cultural heritage, which is defined as important to preserve but beyond the Convention’s remit.Footnote 65 Further, the Convention codified this outstanding interest with the evaluative frame of ‘outstanding universal value’ (‘OUV’).Footnote 66 But it did not further specify OUV, an omission that this article replicates.Footnote 67 Importantly, the 1976 meeting convened to develop OUV criteria articulated universal value as ‘representing or symbolizing a set of ideas or values universally recognized as important or as having influenced the evolution of mankind as a whole’.Footnote 68 A humbler iteration of ‘referring to a large or significant segment of humanity’Footnote 69 was included in the Operational Guidelines in 1977. A 1980 revision rephrased that element of the Guidelines to explain that the Convention is not for all heritage sites of ‘great interest, importance of value, but only for a select list of the most outstanding of these from an international viewpoint’.Footnote 70 Finally, a 2005 revision, which remains in place to date, defined OUV 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’.Footnote 71
In analysing the foregoing, apprehending humanity as the field doxa draws attention to a few elements. First, in generating field autonomy, ‘mankind’ carves out world heritage from a totality of cultural heritage sites. The heritage of humanity is distinguished from the sum total of all heritage that is nationally valuable. This vertical separation acts partly as a functional differentiation that distinguishes humanity’s heritage, which holds objective-cultural value, from national heritage, which might be valorised for subjective-political reasons. But it is also normatively inflected. As the first expert meeting noted, this category indicates a heritage that is more than, and not simply other than, all nationally valorised heritage. Humanity’s common heritage comprises sites that transcend their local contexts of production and valuation. Put in the terms of this article, these sites have more-than-national value, which stands in a relation of distinction to national cultural value.Footnote 72 Second, the doxa is generative of evaluative mechanisms. The field’s genesis process, the final Convention text and the subsequent Operational Guidelines consistently link humanity to universal value. In other words, humanity makes possible this more-than-national heritage, which is indexed by outstanding universal value. Humanity, then, does not stand in contrast to but is generative of the construction of cultural prestige.
Third, and finally, humanity is doxic in the fraught intersection of its illusiveness and the commitment to it. Some of the early meetings risked revealing the doxic impossibility of humanity actually sharing a cultural history across time and space. Such risk was articulated mostly in terms of the criteria of universal value and dealt with either by choosing to bracket the question and forging ahead with the international system, or by suggesting that, while elusive, the idea could, nevertheless, be approximated by certain criteria.Footnote 73 In these moments, contra Mercer, experts as well as states, who were part of the General Assembly and the final meeting that adopted the Convention text, chose not to reveal the illusion of the doxa but to forge a field around it. If this article attends to this doxa as an illusion in its fundamental logic, it is not to collapse discussions of culture to the national-political level. Rather, it follows the Bourdieusian thrust, where critical analysis does not aim to reduce fields to their economic-political grounds but to reveal those grounds to make possible more inclusive or horizontal field constructions. I return to this in the conclusion.
The issue of relative autonomy
That fields have relative autonomy is important to the construction and pursuit of cultural distinction via world heritage. The relativity of world heritage’s autonomy concerns its embeddedness in the broader field of global politics, with state sovereignty as a core logic. Thus, the preparatory expert meetings emphasised that the international authority would not deterritorialise the sites.Footnote 74 The Convention itself obliges states to not take any actions that might damage these sites, but the measures available when a site is damaged are inclusion on the World Heritage in Danger List or delisting. The former mobilises conservation resources, whereas the latter returns the site to the state’s prerogatives.Footnote 75 Not delinking sites from states, the field (re)configures states as their possessors. That configuration begins with Article 3, which gives states the right to nominate sites within their territorial boundaries to the WHL, a feature that has been integral to critical analyses of nationally tinged engagements with world heritage.Footnote 76 Further, in its default view, the virtual WHL lists states in alphabetical order, with ‘their’ sites underneath.Footnote 77
In turn, the autonomy of the field is configured vertically and functionally. States might nominate nationally valuable sites for inscription. However, once nominated, these sites enter the field’s evaluative processes, specifically expert analyses of their requisite OUV.Footnote 78 Others have noted the role experts play in this consecrative process, grounded in their scientific-technical attributes.Footnote 79 This observation points to the functional field differentiation: cultural consecration is entrusted to art historians or conservators. This differentiation, however, is supplemented by a vertical one. During the 1976 meeting on OUV criteria, the case for expertise was made in terms of representing universal consciousness, the Advisory Bodies are referred to as international experts, and national experts leave the room when the World Heritage Panel of ICOMOS (The International Council on Monuments and Sites) reviews related nominations.Footnote 80 In this configuration, international experts are figures who can evaluate cultural value from an international point of view. Successful sites emerge on the other side of this process consecrated as humanity’s shared heritage.Footnote 81
We can apprehend the relative autonomy of world heritage, in its existence and function, as homologous to education’s role in producing cultural distinction and presenting to some students their cultural habitus as objectively and universally valuable. Consecrated by the field as world heritage, sites face the nominators as ‘their’ cultural sites, endowed with more-than-national value and bearing international cultural prestige. Thus, if the configuration that allows states to nominate sites within their territorial boundaries and tethers sites to states on the WHL points to relativity, humanity, universal value, and expert evaluation configure the autonomy of the field. And if relativity allows states to accrue distinction, autonomy generates this distinction in a more-than-national manner.
(Not just) our heritage
States invoke humanity in ways that are congruent with its doxic role, which is entangled with international cultural distinction.Footnote 82 These articulations reproduce the idea that there is such a thing as ‘heritage of humanity’, which extends across time and space. Further, this heritage is one of distinction, attached to ‘the ingenuity of mankind’, ‘human creative genius’, important phases in the ‘history of humanity’, ‘humanity’s great advances’, and the best of men’s talent producing the ‘universality of beauty’.Footnote 83
If these invocations understand and reproduce humanity as connected to the possibility of more-than-national distinction, they also position states in relation to it. The first of these relations is custodial, whereby states position themselves as protectors and preservers of its heritage for humanity.Footnote 84 At this level, the world heritage field allows states to claim prestige as responsible custodians of humanity’s treasures, a position noted as valued and expected by the international community.
The second relation positions states as geographical homes to humanity’s heritage.Footnote 85 Here, one discursive pattern, already invoked with the opening example of Liangzhu, is the ‘not only … but also’ formulation. To take another instance, the delegation of India remarked that ‘until yesterday … the [Rudreshwara] temple belonged to the Palampet village. But today, because of this historical decision … [it] belongs to the world, it belongs to humanity. It is not just a temple property of Palampet village… or of India.’Footnote 86 Similarly, Caral Supe’s inscription demonstrated its ‘special significance not just for Peru, but for humanity’.Footnote 87 If we do not approach these recurrent articulations as cosmopolitan lip service but attend to their correspondence to the field’s doxic configuration, a different set of prestige stakes emerge. Humanity indicates the more-than-national value with which these sites are endowed as world heritage.Footnote 88 At the same time, these remarks follow the field’s configuration of relative autonomy. Thus, the formulation is ‘not just’ national, and not ‘no longer’ national. As the following two speeches – both post-dating 2010 – illustrate, this process is apprehended as a consecration whereby ‘their’ sites now face the nominators as holders of objective-cultural value, not reducible to subjective-political attachments:
On behalf of the Polynesians … [the President of French Polynesia] expresses [their] pride, joy and gratitude for the worldwide recognition of the Taputapuātea cultural landscape as a heritage of humanity. This recognition is a historic moment, which consecrates an extraordinary Polynesian civilization.Footnote 89
The gardens has always been well loved and cherished by Singaporeans. And now we are very proud to have it recognized as a site worthy of exceptional value for humanity … It is an accolade that will resonate deeply with Singaporeans as we come together this year to reflect on our heritage, our identity and our place in the world.Footnote 90
These articulations do not disavow the national ‘we’ but understand it as having accrued international cultural distinction by having its heritage transcend its national context of valorisation. That transcendence, importantly, is not only a matter of being internationally known, but of being internationally valued.Footnote 91
Similarly, in a third relation, states position themselves as contributors to humanity’s heritage. Thus, the delegation of Bosnia and Herzegovina remarked that ‘our tombstones… enrich the rich treasury of cultural heritage of all humanity’,Footnote 92 and the Iranian delegation noted that the Trans-Iranian railway was an ‘industrial heritage of humanity’, made possible by the combination of international know-how and Iranian knowledge.Footnote 93 The delegations celebrating the inscriptions of Fray Bentos Industrial Landscape (Uruguay) and Welsh Slate Landscape (United Kingdom) underlined that the sites represented their contributions to the world and humankind.Footnote 94 Once again, these articulations do not let go of the national ‘we’. But they articulate the distinction of its cultural acumen as the contributions made to the common treasures of humanity. Through humanity, then, states position their national selves as generators and possessors of more-than-national cultural value.Footnote 95
An unsettled field
In identifying the 2010 World Heritage Committee Meeting as a critical juncture, this article agrees with the interdisciplinary scholarship that has made the same observation.Footnote 96 In terms of the article’s conceptual framework, this identification implies that the field functioned smoothly before that meeting. Helpfully, sociologist Steinmetz has developed a conception of autonomous and settled fields, with settled fields defined by agreement on the doxa as well as evaluative matrices.Footnote 97 If this is so, then the field of world heritage had long been unsettled. A partial paradigm shift in 1994 expanded the field’s scope from monumental to vernacular heritage and brought in anthropological matrices of evaluation, which make greater room for cultural diversity.Footnote 98 The shift itself was undergirded by increasing unhappiness with the distribution of world heritage prestige, predominantly concentrated in Europe with its cultural productions easily legible to the field’s early monumental-aesthetic evaluative emphasis. The expansion, in turn, was articulated as not only allowing for the consecration of new forms of heritage but also ameliorating the steep unevenness of field positions.Footnote 99 Laudable as it was, the paradigm shift generated enduring debates on how to and who should consecrate OUV in relation to a more diverse corpus of heritage.Footnote 100 The tenor of these debates resembled contemporaneous developments in other fields such as human rights, with claims of cultural diversity juxtaposed with assertions of these rights’ universality. And yet while the assertions of diversity raised evaluative challenges for world heritage, these debates did not place the doxa into question but revolved around the field’s adjudicative mechanisms and figures.
In contrast, the 2010 meeting witnessed the assertion of political logics which risked subverting the field’s illusio and its ‘relative autonomy’.Footnote 101 The interdisciplinary scholarship has linked this assertion to the desire for field inclusion, to continued resentment about the unbalanced distribution of its prestige, and to the prominent states of the Global South, especially BRICS countries.Footnote 102 More specifically, Brumann has queried why 2010 became this critical juncture. In doing so, he has traced the timing of this challenge to the growing assertiveness of BRICS nations towards liberal internationalist institutions in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.Footnote 103 Understood as such, insofar as it drew from broader shifts in global politics, this critical juncture challenged the field’s relative autonomy in its effects and also in its sources. In turn, the political assertions included state delegations, helmed by political figures, pushing for site inscriptions by overturning expert recommendations. Remarkably, in doing so, ambassadors took the floor to declare that the site had OUV because they had seen it, and the Chairperson’s closing speech declared the meeting successful for having attended to states’ concerns.Footnote 104 And when Thang Long Citadel, pushed by the Committee as a millennium gift to Hanoi, was inscribed, the delegation of Viet Nam brandished flags and framed it as an act of ‘witness[ing] more than a thousand years of history of independent Viet Nam’, which ‘has been continuous as a political power until now’.Footnote 105 Flag brandishing has since become regular practice.
These practices challenged the field’s autonomy as a consecrator of objective-cultural value and risked reducing it to a compiler of a national honours list that emerges from political pressure. In other words, the assertion of political logics jeopardised the construction of prestige as cultural and as international. In 2012, UNESCO’s Director General Irina Bokova rang the alarm bell, asking participants to go back to the regime’s origins in universal value and conservation.Footnote 106 What has followed is a mix of dynamics that a field frame is well suited to parse. On the one hand, expert evaluations continue to be overturned. On the other hand, even when it is foretold that a nomination will be inscribed despite negative expert evaluations, site discussions are lengthy, with Committee members presenting elaborate value-based justifications.Footnote 107 Pointing out that states often bring in expert opinions, decontextualised from ICOMOS evaluations or from outside sources, James connects these dynamics to the quest for scientific-technical burnishing of prestige.Footnote 108 Agreeing with this consecrative function, we can further interpret these dynamics as fraught attempts at recovering the field’s functional autonomy, or as states simultaneity undermining and reconstructing it. States undermine field autonomy as political actors that push back on cultural consecration by experts such as art historians, who would be the proper figures for cultural consecration and the dispensation of field capital. At the same time, states seek to discursively reconstruct this autonomy by drawing on cultural rather than political resources. These discursive resources point to the desire for functional differentiation, integral to the field’s consecration of cultural rather than political acumen. If so, what about the vertical differentiation this article has centred?
Doxic reinterpretations
Once again, my attentiveness to the vertical differentiation is not intended to juxtapose international to national prestige, but to query if prestige quests by states continue to take this more-than-national valence. Among the 191 speeches from the post-2010 period, 67 mention humanity in some form.Footnote 109 Fourteen articulations invoke the world as the more-than-national community to which these sites belong or for which they bear import.Footnote 110 Eight speeches declare sites as a global international property (Lake District), as representing values that counter the contemporary rise of populist nationalisms (Strasbourg), as bearing universal proofs of culture (Wooden Tserkvas), having universal relevance (Jomon Prehistoric Sites), bearing a universal message of peace (Hidden Christian Sites in Nagasaki), a global reference (Susa), a truly international achievement (Naumburg), and as bringing together people from around the world (Lower German Limes), whereas four speeches mention ‘our common’ property or heritage.Footnote 111 Seven speeches ‘share’ the site ‘with the world’, and five promise preservation for future generations.Footnote 112 These dynamics are not dissimilar to those concerning the field’s functional differentiation. Political logics continue to be asserted, at the same time as (some of) these actors seek to partially reconstruct the field’s vertical autonomy with invocations that illustrate enduring investment in more-than-national distinction such that its signs are circulated at each meeting.Footnote 113
Crucially, however, these continued articulations are paralleled by another dynamic. Specifically, some participants – and primarily influential states of the Global South – use the opening and closing sessions of Committee Meetings to put forth a (re)interpretation of humanity as the community of states.Footnote 114 We can identify this theme already in the 2010 meeting, when the Brazilian chairperson’s closing remarks noted that ‘States Parties continue to identify the World Heritage as a paradigm of excellence to preserve humanity’, commented positively on the extended geographic scope of the WHL with ‘three new countries that previously had not been included’, and identified the right approach to humanity’s heritage as ‘understanding of the historical, social, and cultural specificities of these countries’.Footnote 115 During the 2012 meeting, the Russian chairperson remarked that the List had become more representative, with the inclusion of sites from four previously unrepresented countries, and articulated the Convention’s goal as ‘contribut[ing] to a better understanding of the cultural and natural diversity of the world’.Footnote 116 Preparing to chair the 2020 meeting, which would be held virtually in 2021 instead, China’s minister of education noted that world heritage sites are ‘rich accomplishments of human civilization’, ‘shared by all humanity’, and concluded that China would host the Committee Meeting to promote ‘mutual learning among civilizations’ and to build ‘a shared future for humankind’.Footnote 117 The chair subsequently opened the 2021 meeting by calling for ‘a true spirit of multilateralism’ to ‘promote the values of the Convention’ and concluded it by returning to the ‘promotion of dialogue between civilizations’, aimed at ‘jointly preserving the cultural treasures of all humanity’.Footnote 118 Finally, preparing to host the 2022 meeting, which would be postponed due to the country’s war on Ukraine, the Russian ambassador and incoming chair referred to new nominations from African states to express his hope to ‘achieve greater diversity and to ensure better representation of all peoples’ heritage’.Footnote 119
In these interventions, the diversity of humanity is foregrounded, with the Convention’s role articulated as its preservation and promotion. This much could have been comprehended by the field’s partial paradigm shift. However, the positive steps towards that goal are articulated as the inclusion of new states, and their sites, on the List. In that, states are positioned as representatives of humanity’s diversity.Footnote 120 Three acceptance speeches by Brazil, China, and Russia reinforce this interpretation, remarking on heritage as a right for all [states], praising inscriptions as ‘the embodiment of the spirit of Russian national culture’, as ‘contributing to the world’s cultural diversity’, or as ‘a contribution from China to … the cultural diversity of the world’.Footnote 121 If states can adequately represent a diverse humanity, it is no surprise that this claim has a bearing on the field’s consecrative functions, with Egypt identifying the Committee as representing the world’s conscience and expertise, and China proposing that listening ‘to different voices from member states’ is the best response to the challenges of preserving humanity’s heritage.Footnote 122
The foregoing analysis has illustrated that humanity remains in circulation after this critical juncture, and that such circulation remains tethered to its doxic function. As doxa, importantly, humanity is taken up in its distinction function, that is, in its ability to generate more-than-national value. However, if these are the grounds for keeping humanity in circulation, its reconstruction as a community of states jeopardises this very possibility. In other words, it makes it impossible to claim that something more than the sum total of national heritage is at stake. Equally importantly, this reconstruction of humanity risks the other key component of distinction, that is, the separation from political logics, necessary to claim a relation of ‘disinterestedness’ that is elemental to the consecration of value as cultural.
Conclusion
This article analysed world heritage as a field that generates international cultural capital through a configuration of relative autonomy with a functional as well as a vertical dimension. At that intersection, the field consecrates some cultural sites, inevitably products of particular times and places, as bearing objective cultural value that is universally recognisable across time and place. This more-than-national cultural distinction is coveted and pursued by states. When such pursuit unfolds through the assertion of political wills, it risks jeopardising both the cultural and the international aspects of world heritage prestige. The irony is not lost on states. As my analysis illustrated, while they practically undermine the sources of field autonomy, especially when it comes to expert evaluations, states seek to discursively reconstruct it by mobilising cultural rather than political resources in advancing supporting arguments for nominated sites, bringing in (decontextualised) expert opinions, and, finally, continuing to keep humanity in circulation as the field’s condition of possibility.
This analysis, in turn, extends work on world heritage and international cultural prestige, has broader implications for contemporary global political dynamics, and, finally, raises questions that can be the subject of further inquiries. It reinforces recent work that illustrates how states might face unique challenges in pursuing international cultural prestige and extends this work by analysing how states attempt to negotiate these challenges. It illustrates that state engagement with this field is not solely one of national projections but is shaped by the generation of more-than-national value from which states can draw qualitatively different forms of prestige. Furthermore, these assertions of particularity and difference on the one hand, and state wills on the other, are not particular to world heritage. In this sense, world heritage is part of a broader liberal international infrastructure, with its emphasis on universality and its reliance on scientific-technical expertise to formulate and adjudicate that universality. If so, then it is reasonable to conjecture that some of these dynamics of challenge and reconstruction would be at work in other fields. Tracing their broader resonance can, in turn, extend analytical traction into contemporary challenges and the unexpected resilience of governance fields. Finally, there is the question of whether, with its doxic unsettlement, one can still consider world heritage a field. It is beyond the scope of this article to answer that question. But, given the foregoing, a related question is whether and how a field frame comprehends doxic renegotiations, such as reconstitutions of humanity – not only as a community of states, but also as a deeply diverse community. In turn, an analysis of these doxic (re)constitutions is another path to discovering flatter, more capacious possibilities of field constructions, which make room for broader swathes of humanity, and its cultural histories, in less hierarchical relations.
Lastly, I’d propose that in its states-as-humanity form, world heritage could begin to resemble the 19th-century World Fairs, where the host state placed itself centrally in humanity’s culture and progress to generate a similar kind of more-than-national value. Without a more robust autonomy generated by an international field, that construction of humanity was visible for its entanglements with the economic and political fields. Thus, world heritage might frustrate states when they cannot inscribe their sites, but it also promises a more viable construction of international cultural prestige.
Supplementary material
The supplementary material for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021052510096X.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editors of Review of International Studies, the three anonymous reviewers and Jelena Subotić, the co-editor of this special issue, for their incisive and generous comments and expert steering, which have greatly improved this article.
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