Introduction: The Complex Relationship Between Human Rights and World Heritage

Abstract

Over the last 30 years or so, human rights scholars and heritage practitioners have dedicated more and more attention to the complexities of protecting and conserving pieces of collective social memory –monuments, sites, intangible heritage – for the benefit of future generations. This attention has increasingly been shaped in ways that ensure the compliance or compatibility of heritage policy and practice with international human rights law (IHRL) and its ultimate objective: humanity’s best interest. How can we understand these aspirational projects that combine and implement different universalising schemes at the same time? IHRL takes as its point of departure the claim that all humans are equal and made so by virtue of sharing dignity; it turns this claim into the only permitted raison d’état for contemporary state societies. Heritage workers, meanwhile, seek to carry out UNESCO’s mandate of recognising, managing, and in some respects eternalising universal values as they are expressed in human culture – individually as well as collectively, materially as well as immaterially. The intersection between the two projects leads to a complex and challenging relationship, but also offers a fruitful field of social science investigation. For social scientists, philosophers, and researchers in various disciplines, a first challenge concerns the multiple meanings of ‘dignity’, ‘heritage’, and ‘universal value’. What do these concepts mean in general and when translated into specific heritage contexts? Do they really exist, do they have practical consequences, and, if so, on what level? How can consequences be detected, and in what way can they be anchored? A second question concerns how rights and heritage discourses intersect, and what the outcomes are. In particular, contrasts between what the foundational texts of the UNESCO system say about protecting heritage and what the heads of international and governmental institutions actually order their organisations to do in practice have become a source of constant concern and frustration. In recent years numerous rights-oriented heritage initiatives have emerged to explore this conundrum, bridge the gap, and offer practical solutions. In anthropology, as a branch of the social sciences concerned with the constitution of social meaning, relations, and practices, a logical way to start an exploration of establishing universals and eternals is to take a closer look at the specific ‘human right to culture’. This right is simultaneously individual and collective, and requires dealing with the conditions for its creation as well as for its enjoyment. Heritage work itself is widely perceived as belonging to, and being expressive of, the cultural domain of human activities. It is moreover a sector shaped by local, national, and international organisations, not least UNESCO, as the United Nations body dedicated to culture as a whole and heritage in particular. In the World Heritage field, organisations such as the International Council on Monuments and