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World Heritage List: Criteria, Inscription, and Representation

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Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology

Introduction

It has been said that World Heritage is a category, and the World Heritage List is its instrument (Hafstein 2009: 108). While categories themselves are mechanisms for organizing information and making meaning of them (cf. Evans-Prichard 1976: 222-225; Lévi-Strauss 1966), a list “brings greater visibility” to them, rendering them bounded and defined yet at the same time abstracted (Goody 1977: 81). The category of “world heritage” is not universally comprehended but rather must be effectively constructed, communicated, and standardized in meaning to meet the world’s varied understandings of culture, heritage, and patrimony, and to convey UNESCO’s principle objectives. The World Heritage List accomplishes this; it converts places primarily of local import into sites publically recognized as possessing universal value through a complex, ritual process that engages actors from local, regional, national, and transnational realms. This entry will outline the major turns of...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Michael A. Di Giovine

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  1. Michael A. Di Giovine
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Correspondence to Michael A. Di Giovine .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Archaeology, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Claire Smith

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Di Giovine, M.A. (2014). World Heritage List: Criteria, Inscription, and Representation. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_365

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_365

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