The Consecration of World Heritage Sites – Practice and Critique

Abstract

In their work on heritage futures, Cornelius Holtorf and other colleagues go beyond situating archaeology, preservation, heritage and the discourses and practices connected with them in contemporary societies as critical heritage studies have rightly done. Instead, they reflect on the implications of archaeology and heritage for future societies. In his contribution, Holtorf engages with a recent study by Lewis Borck (2018) on heritage practices as futuremaking, which examines cultural heritage sites inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List for the regions of North America and the Caribbean. Borck draws on the notion of prefiguration – a very valuable analytic term in Holtorf’s view – in order to describe how “archaeologists use the past in the present to construct a history for the production of the future” (Borck 2018: 232). He is concerned with the choice of sites included in the World Heritage List and thus with current archaeological preservation practices prefiguring – and distorting – the future look back into the past. He claims that with 55 out of 61 listed World Heritage Sites representing vertically-organized societies, the visible traces of Western and colonial societies are highly overrepresented in the regions of North America and the Caribbean. Thus, he worries that this distortion is creating “a hierarchical history [which will limit, HS] our ability to imagine, both implicitly and explicitly, alternative ways to organize collectively outside of top-down power structures” (Borck 2018: 234). While Holtorf is sympathetic to Borck’s approach of drawing on the notion of prefiguration, he calls for more differentiation in this particular case.