by Chris Wiebe
National Trust for Canada, Ottawa
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Lynn Meskell, A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018, 372 pages. ISBN 978-0-19-064834-3, $38.50 (hardcover)
Over the past fifty years, World Heritage has become UNESCO’s flagship program, at once a powerful instrument for spotlighting and conserving heritage around the globe, and a prestigious “brand” avidly sought by nation states. A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace by Lynn Meskell—a professor of anthropology at Stanford University—is a fresh and spirited critical study of World Heritage that is a surprising page-turner. Merkell explores the program from stem to stern, rooting her incisive insights in years of observer status at World Heritage Committee meetings, off-the-record interviews with UNESCO staff, and on-the ground research at numerous heritage conservation projects around the world. Taken together, it’s a globe-trotting, gritty exploration of the inner workings and contradictions of World Heritage as it struggles to deliver on its lofty mandate to help ensure global peace through cultural heritage understanding and protection.
Manitobans will find this book particularly illuminating, as the province saw its first World Heritage inscription to the World Heritage List in 2018: Pimachiowin Aki, a mixed cultural and natural heritage site straddling the Manitoba-Ontario border. This inscription came after twenty years of work by Indigenous communities in the region, along with the Manitoba, Ontario, and federal governments, three nomination attempts at the World Heritage Committee, and over $16 million in government funding support for the bid. Pimachiowin Aki has now joined the august family of 1,082 World Heritage sites. But what sort of family is it? A sprawling and slightly dysfunctional one, as Meskell’s book makes clear, but one that still keeps alight the flame of its idealistic origins.
Roughly following the arc of World Heritage history, A Future in Ruins begins with UNESCO’s genesis in 1942, when the Allies began planning the reconstruction of education systems in a liberated Europe. By 1945 UNESCO was made permanent, with one historian describing its mission thus: “Following the catastrophes of the twentieth century, there is a need to reconstruct and above all, educate, in a scientific frame of mind, human beings that are equal and different, possessing the means to communicate, in order to protect and safeguard peace, the diversity of cultures, and ultimately life itself.” Meskell describes how UNESCO’s early leadership (particularly Julian Huxley, brother of novelist Aldous Huxley) were imbued with ideas of utopian social engineering and the creation of a united world culture, a key instrument of which was the celebration of collective cultural achievements. These early leaders were also influenced by antiquarian, art historical, and architectural approaches to understanding cultural heritage, and so there was a gradual shift, in Meskell’s reading, from “archaeological discovery to monument recovery” (emphasis hers). An archaeologist by training, Meskell returns to this relegation of archaeology to the margins intermittently throughout the book, without fully unpacking the implications.
UNESCO’s most high-profile early undertaking, beginning in 1959 and continuing to 1980, was the international mobilization to rescue Nubian monuments along the Nile River in advance of flooding from the construction of the Aswan High Dam. The Nubian Rescue involved engineering feats like the dismantling and reerection of dozens of temples, tombs, and early Christian churches from Egypt and Sudan, most spectacularly the Abu Simbel Temples, sawn into 7,047 blocks and reassembled above the Nile’s new waterline. It attracted huge media attention, small donations from individuals around the globe, and involved cooperation from Russian and the United States at the height of the Cold War. “This international assembly,” writes Meskell, “was the utopian image UNESCO had dreamed of, uniting nations with different ideologies, religions and traditions, and even those who were engaged in mutual hostilities.” In reality, nations used the project for their own ends and political aims, including leveraging aid funds to ensure substantial gifts of artifacts, even entire temples (e.g., the Temple of Dendur at the Met in New York) to Western museums.
After this and other early “salvage missions” like Borobudur in Indonesia and the Sukothai capital in Thailand, UNESCO took on more “technical, advisory and reporting priorities and moved further away from supporting multidisciplinary, research-oriented programs.” There was a pronounced shift, Meskell argues, from saving places to taking on the role of “standard-setting agency and the world’s clearinghouse for culture.”
Part of this was the formulation of UNESCO’s Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage in 1972. Emerging after fierce debates and institutional rivalries, the World Heritage Convention sought to inventory, categorize, and monitor the management of the “world heritage of mankind as a whole,” namely those with Outstanding Universal Value. These sites, however, can only be nominated by the countries that are State Parties to the convention, inevitably injecting politics into World Heritage’s lofty intentions. Meskell chronicles the use of World Heritage inscription for territorial claims at such as places as Jerusalem or the Thai- Cambodian border, or as an instrument of historical erasure as with the Armenian legacy at Ani, Turkey, or Korean slave labour at Japanese Meiji Industrial Revolutions sites. “National prestige, money, and the international bargaining power that World Heritage status bestows,” Meskell writes, “now eclipses the conservation of historic sites.” Bracing stuff, but here, as elsewhere, Meskell can push too hard with the glass half-empty logic. She moves quickly from the particular to the whole while occasionally, almost begrudgingly, acknowledging that World Heritage, in spite of many failings, continues to accomplish some good. What we would be without it is not adequately explored here. A more even-handed reckoning, at many points, would have made her narrative no less gripping.
Later chapters of A Future in Ruins examine how World Heritage status is damaging historic sites, and in extreme cases, making them targets for destruction by states or terrorists. In 2016, for example, the World Heritage Committee debated the state of Venice following a report that the Italian authorities had overexploited the cultural and natural heritage and put it at risk. At Hampi, Indian authorities used World Heritage inscription as a pretext to cleanse the site of the community that had called it home for generations, leveling shops and houses around the main temple, and discarding their living histories. In Palmyra, Syria, and Timbuktu, Mali ancient treasures were destroyed, live to video, and who can forget the shelling into rubble of Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Buddhas? The deliberate destruction of these cultural heritage sites was calculated to get Western media attention, but it was also a deliberate response to how World Heritage status, including the whole notion of ‘one world’ and ‘the common heritage of humanity’ is underpinned by Western values.
Meskell’s book concludes by pondering the way UNESCO is held back by its Eurocentric and technocratic ways and needs to expand its vision, for instance by engaging with Indigenous peoples around the globe, and to extend understanding of intangible heritage. UNESCO today embodies the tension between its ambitions as a global body uniting the world and its present reality as an intergovernmental one, where it is yet another theatre of geo-politics, albeit with the world’s most beautiful places as its stars.
We thank S. Goldsborough for assistance in preparing the online version of this article.
Page revised: 4 June 2021
