Chapter 1 Introduction: Traveling Across Stones that Speak Chapter 2 Chapter 1. Mediating World Heritage: Authenticity and Fields of Production in World Heritage Chapter 3 Chapter 2. The Heritage-scape: UNESCO's Globalizing Endeavor Chapter 4 Chapter 3. "Unity in Diversity": The Heritage-scape's Meta-Narrative Claim Chapter 5 Chapter 4. Tourism: The Heritage-scape's Ritual Interaction Chapter 6 Chapter 5. Converting Local Places into Universal Heritage Chapter 7 Chapter 6. Politics and Personalities within the Heritage-scape: Narratives of Nature and Culture in Viet Nam Chapter 8 Chapter 7. Mummification of Local Cultures: The Cases of Ha Long and Hoi An Chapter 9 Chapter 8. Creating the Drama of the Destination: Managing, Interpreting, and Branding World Heritage Sites Chapter 10 Chapter 9. Preserving the Past: Value and the Emotional Efficacy of World Heritage Sites Chapter 11 Chapter 10. The Problematics of Preservation: Narrative and Practice in Angkor Archaeological Park Chapter 12 Chapter 11. Raising Awareness, Re-Presenting the Heritage-scape: Fragmentary and Reproducible Re-Presentations Chapter 13 Conclusion: The Future of the Heritage-scape
Michael A. Di Giovine is a socio-political researcher in the department of anthropology at the University of Chicago.
This is the most thorough and sophisticated examination of the
UNESCO heritage system to date. The author, a former tour operator
and now an anthropologist, examines the cultural construction of
this system from a number of points of view. Using the
anthropological works of Appadurai, Bruner, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett,
Leite, Mazzarella and others, as well as the works of historians of
art, museums and gardens, geographers of place-making, sociologists
of authenticity, practice and memory, cultural theorists of
cyberspace and educational theory, he carefully examines the
origins, growth, applications and multivocalic reactions to the
World Heritage making process. Although he examines events and
monuments of Southeast Asia, especially Cambodia, and in Italy,
especially Tuscany, in ethnographic detail, his knowledge of the
heritage-making process is encyclopedic and critical. This is a
book to be enjoyed for its timeliness, its revealing anecdotes, and
its attention to contemporary social theory.
*Nelson Graburn, University of California, Berkeley & London
Metropolitan University*
Di Giovine's book is about possibly the largest broker of cultural
meaning and institutional producer of 'heritage,' one which is
virtually unimpeachable in its self-perpetuating discourse of
legitimacy supported by ample cultural capital. Di Giovine offers a
necessary critique, a deconstruction of both the tropes used by
UNESCO in production of mythohistorical, disembedded heritage and a
detailed look at the fractures in its universalizing agenda.
Ultimately, the 'heritage-scape' is an important contribution to
the discussion on the production of narratives and material culture
of 'modernity'-defined through a normative experience of the past
and a strategic structuring of that experience.
*Journal Of Tourism and Cultural Change, June 2009*
The book opens challenging new opportunities to look at heritage
and tourism markets. During the past few years studies in cultural
anthropology, sociology and geography have emerged that focus on
the global heritage system. Michael A. Di Giovine's refreshing
insights into the heritage of humankind could enhance a new form of
dialogue between conservation specialists, tour operators and
anthropologists and give impetus to debates about different
cultures and conservation schools. Such a debate could also be a
contribution to intercultural dialogue.
*International Journal of Heritage Studies, July-September
2010*
Di Giovine makes a contribution to academic and professional
understandings about the role of administrative culture as it
relates to the global level of world heritage and tourism. Di
Giovine draws on his experience as tour operator and ethnographer
to assess the production of meaning at World Heritage sites.
*Curator: The Museum Journal, July 2008*
Di Giovine terms the "UNESCO's newly ordered social structure" of
World Heritage sites as the heritage-scape....The book is a project
of global ethnography to conceptualize the notion, processes, and
position of World Heritage Sites in contemporary globalized
world….The book offers some unique perspectives regarding the
relationship of heritage with tourism due to the author's
experience as tour operator that brings in insights from within the
tourism industry. The multi-sited ethnographic accounts of world
heritage sites in the Southeast Asia is well weaved with discussion
of how various players including the hosts, the guests and the
heritage agencies interact in a complex network.
*Conservation South Asia*
Debates continue to rage about the economic, political, and
socio-cultural significance attached to, and conferred by, the
UNESCO designation of "World Heritage." What Michael di Giovine
achieves in this important book, through detailed research and
critical theoretical reflection, is to ground these debates in a
comprehensive and compelling examination of the motivations,
processes, networks, and people which not only shape the meanings
of the past, but which also project into the future. He carefully
reveals that the World Heritage program of UNESCO, and the tourism
associated with this, extend well beyond notions of privileged
material preservation and can be seen to encourage a universal
discourse which connects and unites people, places, and pasts and
which can catalyze possibilities for meaningful exchange,
experience, and peace. This is clearly an essential book for all
interested in the relationships and meanings which lie behind, and
are generated by, the notion of World Heritage.
*Mike Robinson, Leeds Metropolitan University*
This book is a substantial monograph concerned with the interface
between heritage and tourism. ... An innovative ethnography, …Di
Giovine's work is successful in bringing to the fore the
contingent, negotiated, and at times marginalising nature of World
Heritage and mass tourism that happens in World Heritage sites in
Southeast Asia. Of significance is his observation of the work of
UNESCO beyond a designatory or list-making regime, and as a global
ordering and placemaking process aimed at creating a peaceful
transnational utopia. ... All in all, this is an exciting
contribution to the field of heritage and tourism studies.
*Journal Of Heritage Tourism*
The Heritage-scape: UNESCO, World Heritage and Tourism is a
valuable compendium and very useful for those like ourselves who
have worked near or in relation to World Heritage Sites. ... The
book is worth bringing to people's attention.
*James Fernandez, Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences,
University of Chicago*
The Heritage-Scape is a "global ethnography" which provides a
comprehensive and critical analysis of the complex relationship
between UNESCO, World Heritage, and tourism. Described in the book
as an anthropologist and former tour guide, Di Giovine draws upon
extensive fieldwork, his participation in the tour industry, and
close readings of UNESCO documents and texts in order to form his
insightful coverage of this triangular relationship…. This is an
important book. Di Giovine undoubtedly succeeds in this attempt to
analyze UNESCO's World Heritage program, moving effortlessly
between detailed case study illustrations of World Heritage-related
processes at specific sites, explanation of the workings and
declarations of UNESCO, and more generalized discussion of the
processes and implications of this inherently globalizing endeavor.
Indeed, this is an anthropological study of globalization par
excellence. It is therefore an essential book for a broad
readership, including academics, researchers, and students in the
fields of anthropology of globalization, tourism studies, cultural
studies and heritage, as well as practitioners in the area of
heritage tourism. Di Giovine is to be applauded for this timely and
comprehensive examination of the contemporary World Heritage
system.
*Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 67, 295-96, 2011*
Heritage-Scape is the most penetrating analysis of World Heritage
to date and a thoughtful critical contribution to the grounding of
heritage debates. Although it basically examines sites in Cambodia,
the examples are well selected and analysed in depth to make a
global analysis of the heritage-making process from almost all
points of view. This gives rise to a deep text that is clear,
comprehensive and full of suggestive ideas. It is incisive in its
critical examinations, and offers various rich levels of readings
that will surely encourage new approaches and studies of heritage
in the broadest sense. It is definitely an essential book for
anyone involved in heritage studies and - or- cultural
geography.
*Cultural Geographies*
At the forefront of advocacy, creation of new mechanisms and the
teaching and dissemination of a variety of approaches to save our
field and fulfill the profession’s basic moral directive of
protecting cultural integrity and diversity, both living and
historic, giving teeth to the work of anthropologists more than a
generation ago who have helped build global indigenous peoples
movements, and international law with new declarations and
pressures for enforcement, and in other ways.
*Anthropology in Action*
Across a range of disciplines, we are now awash in scapes,
beginning with the social constructivist reengagement with
landscape (e.g., Cosgrove 1984) and especially since Appadurai’s
(1996[1990]) proposal of five dimensions of global cultural flows –
all scapes: ethnoscape, mediascape, technoscape, financescape, and
ideoscape. It was inevitable that heritagescape would be coined
(see Garden 2006). Among the many uses of the term today, Mitchell
and DeWaal (2009) define heritagescape as a landscape of
historicalbuildings cum amenities, a place of commodified heritage.
Here we have awareness of the economic forces driving heritage
construction (literally and figuratively). Their work resonates
with earlier studies of the manufacture and
consumption of heritage (see, e.g., AlSayyad).
Michael Di Giovine (2009) analyzes the heritage-scape that UNESCO
has created, deploying the term in hyphenated form with the full
weight of Appadurai’s disentanglement of
globalization. He asserts, correctly, that UNESCO is engaged in an
“ambitious placemaking strategy designed to rearrange the
geopolitical landscape into a reconceptualization
of the world. . . the heritage-scape is a real social structure
which creates real material effects on a globally distributed
population in accordance with UNESCO’s long-term goals” (2009: 6).
This apprehension becomes a new point of departure in Cultural
heritage studies.
*Springer*
![]() |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
![]() |