Introduction: Heritage Gone Global. Investigating the Production and Problematics of Globalized Pasts

Wherever one looks today, “heritage” abounds. Whether conceived as material or immaterial legacies, as a sphere of commercial potential or as an anchor of belonging, references to heritage are omnipresent across sectors. Implying certain relationships between history, memory and identity (Lowenthal 1994), heritage is a set of present‐day ideas and practices referring to and utilizing the past. As such, it has come to be valued as a versatile medium of social, cultural and political recognition, as underpinning claims for rights, as well as a potential source of cultural exchange and economic and touristic development (Kirshenblatt‐Gimblett 1998; AlSayyad 2001; Timothy & Boyd 2003; Dallen 2007).

Traditionally, the concept of heritage has been closely tied to the nation state. Indeed, in some languages, most notably those of Latin origin, the word itself (for example, the French “Patrimoine”) shares etymological roots with terms for the homeland. Increasingly, however, heritage and memory are being tied to supranational claims and understandings (Bianchi & Boniface 2002; Macdonald 2003; Greenspan 2005; Levy & Sznaider 2006; Meskell 2009a). This Special Issue of History and Anthropology addresses this “global” turn. It sets out to analyse and discuss the ways in which heritage issues have gained increasing attention in a world of globalization, and how certain aspects of heritage have come to be seen and practised as transnational, cosmopolitan or “world heritage”—while still, in many cases, being strongly tied to and interweaved with local, national or ethnic understandings.

Referring, of course, to the past, heritage in its current shape as a medium of identity politics and economic potential is nevertheless a rather novel phenomenon. Timothy Mitchell, in his analysis of the “making of the nation” in colonial Egypt, spells out the peculiar temporalities inherent in the heritage concept: “One of the odd things about the arrival of the era of the modern nation state was that for a state to prove it was modern, it helped if it could also prove it was ancient” (Mitchell 2001: 212). Heritage is a term of the present and works by mobilizing selected pasts and histories in the service of present‐day agendas and interests. Or, in the apt words of Barbara Kirshenblatt‐Gimblett (1998: 149), heritage is “a new mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past”. Along the same lines, McCrone, Morris and Kiely, writing on the Scottish heritage scene, note the expanding semantics underlying the term:

Strictly speaking, heritage refers to that which has been or may be inherited, anything given or received to be a proper possession, an inherited lot or portion. But heritage has outgrown its legal definition. It has come to refer to a panoply of material and symbolic inheritances, some hardly older than the possessor. We have constructed heritage because we have a cultural need to do so in our modern age. Heritage is a condition of the late twentieth century. (McCrone et al. 1995: 1)

Today, heritage is a seemingly ubiquitous concept, embraced by actors and stakeholders across a number of industries and sectors, including tourism, urban planning and politics (Lowenthal 1998; Howard 2003; Smith 2006). However, whereas a number of researchers, including Mitchell and McCrone, Morris and Kiely (above), have documented and analysed the symbiotic connection between the concepts of heritage and nation, our present concern is the ways in which heritage today is increasingly understood as referring to global frames and imaginaries. More specifically, this collection of papers points to the paradoxes and tensions often underlying “global” heritage claims and understandings. Inquiring empirically into a number of developments which seem to point in global or cosmopolitan directions, we seek to shed light on the questions: in what senses have heritage and its concomitant understandings and practices become globalized? How are various forms of “globality” constituted in opposition to, entanglement or even symbiosis with other identifications and mindsets of, for example, local and national scope? How are claims to globalized heritage assembled, appropriated and contested? And how do such claims and discourses relate to the everyday activities, practicalities and material aspects of heritage?

Heritage Beyond the Nation

For many years, the concept of heritage has been closely tied to the nation state, to such a degree that “our” heritage has most often implied our national heritage, in a “banal” fashion, to adopt Michael Billig’s (1995) terminology. ¹ Indeed, the concept has been, and in many cases still is, so intimately tied to the idea of the nation state and its institutions as to be nigh inseparable from them. Heritage, archaeology and the past were important elements in the conceptual toolbox of the nation building of the nineteenth century (see Díaz‐Andreu 2001; Kohl 1998), mobilized and utilized in the “naturalization” of new imagined national communities (Anderson 1991; Mitchell 2001). Working to reassert symbolic and physical borders and display differences between countries and populations, and literally tying these to “their” territory through material traces dug up from its soil, heritage and archaeology helped materialize the national histories and memories as the property of “the people” in question. In David Lowenthal’s Durkheimian formulation, “[i]n celebrating symbols of their histories, societies in fact worship themselves” (Lowenthal 1994: 46). Lowenthal goes on: “Heritage distinguishes us from others; it gets passed on only to descendants, to our own flesh and blood; newcomers, outsiders, foreigners all erode and debase it” (1994: 47, emphasis in original).

Steven Hoelscher echoes this, contending that, “the concerns of heritage, by their very nature, are exclusive and exclusionary”. He elaborates:

Indeed, awarding possession to some, while excluding others, gives heritage its primary function. Heritage, therefore, is a faith, and like all faiths it originates in the deeply rooted human need to give meaning to temporary chaos, to secure group boundaries, and to provide a symbolic sense of community and certainty that is often lacking in everyday life. As a way of apprehending, ordering, and displaying the past, heritage’s future looks bright. (Hoelscher 2006: 216)

While on the one hand this exclusionary aspect continues to cling to the concept of heritage, on the other a current wave of global and/or cosmopolitan heritage work seems to suggest an opposite trend towards associating heritage with tolerance and inclusion. This is a key paradox with which we grapple: the ways in which global perspectives are in constant friction with local, national or even individual agendas. Sharon Macdonald, drawing on Collier and Ong’s concept of “global assemblages”, argues that heritage “is a supreme means of assembling and sustaining ‘the local’ but at the same time it assembles cosmopolitan and global elements and can itself be characterized as a ‘global assemblage’ in its capacity to ‘move across and reconstitute’ ‘specific situations’” (Macdonald 2009: 119, quoting Collier & Ong 2005).

What is particularly important in this quote is its insistence, which we share, that heritage has not simply gone global. There is no neat epochal chronology in place in which older local or national meanings are unanimously overridden or rendered obsolete as the global agendas simply take over. Although some scholars subscribe to a view in which the nation is losing out to global networks and dependencies—or even that we inhabit a “postnational” era (for example, Appadurai 1996; Habermas 1998; Pieterse 2000)—the present collection of papers questions such a standpoint. The authors explore the tensions between local, national and international scales in the negotiation, presentation and interpretation of heritage, seeking to reinvestigate and stir up taken‐for‐granted ideas such as “scalar” assumptions “in which, say, the micro is seen as nestling inside the macro, or the local inside the global” (Macdonald 2009: 118). As Macdonald points out poignantly,

[t]his does not mean that categories such as “global” and “local” necessarily become irrelevant but rather than marking out the territory to be investigated at the outset, and being fixed points of reference within the analysis, the interest is instead in how such categories and divisions are themselves produced. (2009: 119)

The contributors to this volume share this interest in the production of heritage; what Macdonald calls an “assemblage perspective”, directing “our attention less to finished “heritage products” than to processes and entanglements involved in their coming into being and continuation” (2009: 118). We could also phrase this as a move from an interest in heritage per se to a focus on ““heritageisation” as a process” (Harvey 2001: 320, emphasis in original). Such a focus enables this issue’s contributors to address issues of cultural contact, uses of history, property rights and issues of preservation of local, national and global “pasts”. For instance, Brichet’s paper concerns the coproduction processes underlying a so‐called “common” cultural heritage project involving institutions and stakeholders from Denmark and Ghana, and the complex ways in which processes, places and materials are argued about and eventually become embedded with meanings in the joint efforts of Danish and Ghanaian informants. Similarly, the article from Vos analyses processes and paradoxes of ongoing attempts to turn selected sites in Serbia into “European” heritage sites and symbols, involving in some cases a deliberate sidestepping of more famous sites perceived as “difficult” by key actors involved with the project. Discussing the Serbian and transnational work of assembling a meaningful European heritage, Vos points to the enormous bureaucratic challenges facing those involved and to the fact that the qualities of the sites themselves are not always at the top of the list of priorities in this war‐torn region.

As these and other contributions point out, alleged “global” heritage practices must be subjected to critical analysis. Why are certain kinds of heritage proposed as global or transnational? What counts as globalized (or European) heritage in different contexts and to different agents? Do the globalization of heritage and the cosmopolitanization of memory truly signal a movement beyond national borders and identities, as proposed by UNESCO and a number of theorists of cosmopolitanism (see below), or should we, rather, analyse these tendencies as indicative of a new pattern of interdependent nationalisms?

Cosmos and its Limitations

In recent years, a steady stream of academic work has investigated and attempted to reformulate the notion of cosmopolitanism. ² Different definitions abound, but basically, the notion of cosmopolitanism refers to the equality of all human beings and all cultures, and to the moral obligation of individuals and groups towards others, including those across borders. “We have asked what we owe our fellow human beings, not what we owe our fellow nationals”, as Robert Post (2006: 1) phrases it. Pheng Cheah (2006: 487) states that “the cosmopolitan’s universal circle of belonging embraces the whole of humanity”, while Nowicka and Rovisco (2009: 3) define “moral cosmopolitanism” as “the philosophical perspective that posits that all human beings ought to be morally committed to an essential humanity above and beyond the reality of one’s particularistic attachments (such as nationality, kinship, religion)”. In line with these views, Beck, Levy and Sznaider argue that “cultural memory can no longer be located territorially” (Beck et al. 2009: 113). They contend that the Holocaust constitutes “the foundation for a cosmopolitan memory” (2009: 112) which, in its iconic capacity as world history, supposedly reaches beyond the nation state. In their perspective, the horror of the Holocaust frames and necessitates a collective memory of humanity which calls for new understandings and actions—in conservation, commemoration and scientific approaches (and see Beck & Sznaider 2006). In this strand of theorizing over cosmopolitanism, the global sphere and the nation are regarded as opposites. In their plea for a “cosmopolitan research agenda for the social sciences”, Beck and Sznaider, for instance, state that “cosmopolitanism does not only negate nationalism but also presupposes it” (2006: 20). They assert that, “the light of the great cultural problems has moved on from a nation‐state definition of society and politics to a cosmopolitan outlook” (2006: 2).

These are sweeping diagnoses indeed. In our view—informed by our training as anthropologists and an ingrained disciplinary scepticism towards universal claims to all‐embracing systems of human morality and conduct—they are too general. We are sceptical towards their universal applicability. Tony Bennett remains similarly cautious towards accepting the alleged “global transformations” within the heritage sector as a mere fact (Bennett 2006). He focuses in particular on the museum institution, arguing that while public museums are obviously involved in cross‐border transactions and networks, they remain “largely, and probably entirely, the administrative creations of national, municipal, or local governments or private organizations” (2006: 47). Bennett even states that, “there are a number of ways in which museums are now arguably less globalized than their nineteenth‐century counterparts” (2006: 48, emphasis in original). In a related vein, Martin Prösler has documented how the museum institution was, in general, characterized by universalist aspirations in the royal collections of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, before turning increasingly “national”—evolving into national museums—during the nineteenth century. The globalization of museums, Prösler convincingly points out, is in fact a globalization of the idea of the national (Prösler 1996: 36). Studies such as these thus serve to stress that there is no such thing as a universal epochal “ladder”. In line with this, and contra Beck and Sznaider, we remain hesitant towards embracing generalized claims as to the “negation” of the nation, and of how “we” have somehow “moved on” from one (narrow, national) epoch to the next (enlightened, cosmopolitan). In such a discourse, a distinct political vision and morality takes shape, pitting the national and the cosmopolitan vision as opposites or even “enemies”, as a key paper by Beck (2002) has it. With the contributions at hand, we seek precisely to unsettle such a neat either/or. ³

Bruno Latour has argued that Beck’s otherwise sympathetic cosmopolitan visions fail to accommodate other “cosmoses” than a Western Enlightenment one: “The problem we face now”, Latour contends, “is that it’s precisely this “one cosmos”, what I call mononaturalism, that has disappeared” (Latour 2004: 453, emphasis in original). In Latour’s critical view, Beck’s “peace proposals” are doomed to fail, since they cannot fathom the radical othernesses of alternative perspectives:

“Humanity” was a great and welcome discovery and has been a great and welcome discovery each time after that (after World War II, notably) it has come into prominence. And yet, if all the United Nations members were satisfied to be “just humans”, if the UNESCO lingua franca was enough to define all habitants of the planet, peace would already reign. Since there is no peace, there must be something wrong with this humanistic definition of an emancipated human as the only acceptable member of the Club. (2004: 457)

No one can be an opponent of peace or mutual understanding. Inclined to agree with Latour’s position in this case, we do believe, however, that the best ways analytically to tackle peace proposals, world heritage claims and cosmopolitan calls do not run via subscriptions to established Western positions. What we seek instead is to indulge in the realities of alternative perspectives, and/or ask what “other” sets of logic and moralities underlie various understandings of globality.

Vernacular Voices

A number of authors have suggested less normative, more practical oriented versions of cosmopolitanism—including “vernacular” (Bhabha 1996), “rooted” (Appiah 1998), and “actually existing” cosmopolitanism (Robbins 1998)—in their attempts to tie the term closer to the realm of everyday practice. Most notably for our specific concerns, a recent volume edited by Lynn Meskell (2009a) grapples with what she terms “cosmopolitan archaeologies”. In this anthology, the authors present and discuss a range of projects concerning heritage research and management. In her introduction to the volume, Meskell argues that archaeology and other disciplines enmeshed in heritage issues have an obligation to “cosmopolitan heritage ethics”, involving and respecting the communities in which they work, and also that these disciplines have the potential for a substantial contribution to what she calls a “cosmopolitan spirit” (2009b: 26). She explains:

Our research carries ethical responsibilities to the living communities with whom we work. But more than simply adhering to ethical codes developed from our discipline, a cosmopolitan approach both extends our obligations to these communities and steps up to acknowledge our role as participants in national and international organizations and developments. (2009b: 1)

Meskell’s contribution is significant and nuanced, and we, no less than her, are concerned with local understandings. Indeed, in the present collection, we take a somewhat similar point of departure in investigating the participatory relationship in transcultural heritage projects. However, we do so without embracing a “cosmopolitan spirit” per se. In our view, the cosmopolitan outlook, although softened by “vernacular” approaches, implies a normative engagement with global heritage projects which is inhibitive rather than productive for analytical purposes. In other words, we go about analysing cosmopolitan claims, understandings and practices, but without regarding them as intrinsically superior to local, regional or national perspectives. We seek to investigate cosmopolitanism rather than embrace it. In our view, cosmopolitanism is not necessarily always a solution, but rather a particular perspective, often elitist (see Calhoun 2002; Gonzáles‐Ruibal 2009), not least within the sphere of heritage. “Vernacular” ideas of global or cosmopolitan heritage are always positioned within local and national practices and political dilemmas.

Globalism and Universalism Contested

In a thoughtful essay on UNESCO and the world heritage list, Barbara Kirshenblatt‐Gimblett (2006) critically analyses claims to cosmopolitan citizenship and humanity inherent in UNESCO as a global institution. She questions the implied relationship between culture, heritage and humanity and argues that it is a particular appropriation of culture which turns life into heritage, and that the link between heritage and humanity is heavily idealized by cosmopolitan claims:

Once cultural assets become world heritage, a shift occurs in the relation of heritage to its new beneficiary, that is, to humanity. First, humanity is not a collective in the way that heritage‐producing communities are. Second, neither humanity as a whole nor the individuals who constitute humanity carry, bear, or transmit the heritage of humanity, let alone create and/or reproduce it. If and when they do, issues of appropriation and exploitation arise. Third, any rights one might assert to the heritage of humanity are first and foremost rights of access, consumption, and, in a general but not legal sense, inheritance. (2006: 184)

We share such a basic suspicion towards the effects of (world) heritage labelling, and the contributors set out to scrutinize cases of privileges of access, consumption and inheritance, as well as the appropriation and exploitation of what is understood as or claimed to be global heritage. Even if the heritage industry is booming, and if, as Kirshenblatt‐Gimblett sarcastically notes, “life becomes heritage almost before it has a chance to be lived” (2006: 180), not everything is recognised as heritage and not everyone has the same interest as to what is proclaimed to be heritage and in what ways. UNESCO and other global agencies play a decisive role in the conceptualization and recognition of heritage. It is therefore important, we insist, to study locally what this globalization of heritage means and how it is negotiated and contested in local contexts; for “heritage itself is seen as inherently good and therefore cause for celebration. In reality, of course, heritage is hotly contested” (2006: 190). We need to study and theorize such cases of contestation in order to understand the dilemmas and paradoxes of “globalized heritage”. Rather than celebrate our common humanity, we must try to understand it in all its contested heterogeneity.

Indeed, the world heritage concept is perhaps the most obvious example of the entwining between the local, national and global levels (Bianchi & Boniface 2002; Harrison & Hitchcock 2005; Smith 2006: 95–102). The intense lobbying of national governments and ethnic communities working to ensure that their “global” piece of heritage is brought forth and acknowledged readily demonstrates the underlying messiness of mankind’s shared “property”. The very term “property”, notes Laurajane Smith (2006: 101), “reinforces the sense in which the cultural values associated with a place or object can be captured and frozen” (and see Handler 1985, 2003). Quoting Henry Cleere (2001), Smith also points to the fact that UNESCO’s concept of universality is “deeply rooted in the European cultural tradition, combining historical and aesthetic parameters that derive from classical philosophy” (Smith 2006: 101).

A specific example of such complexities of what we may call the “politics of universalism” is the claim, put forth in 2002 by the directors of nineteen major Western museums, that they are not (any more) to be considered national museums but instead see themselves as universal museums. In the so‐called “Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums”, the signatories suggest that “we should acknowledge that museums serve not just the citizens of one nation but the people of every nation”. ⁴ This profoundly cosmopolitan assertion has, however, been assailed by a number of critics (for example, Lewis 2004; O’Neill 2004; Curtis 2006; Abungu 2008) for whom the declaration epitomizes Eurocentric elitism. In the eyes of its opponents, the document constitutes a thinly disguised counter‐initiative against the long range of restitution and repatriation claims which these mega museums face from third‐world countries and groups. The declaration, according to one of its sharpest critics, Geoffrey Lewis, then Chairman of ICOM’s Ethics Committee, constitutes

a statement of self‐interest, made by a group representing some of the world’s richest museums; they do not, as they imply, speak for the “international museum community”. The debate today is not about the desirability of “universal museums” but about the ability of a people to present their cultural heritage in their own territory. (2004: 3)

Thus, we see how in this case, as elsewhere, global claims are set against a backdrop of particular and hotly contested issues of national and ethnic identity and ownership. Tellingly, none of the alleged universal museums is situated out of Europe and North America. At the same time many of these same museum giants, including the Louvre, the Guggenheim, and the British Museum, embark on a novel and curious franchising crusade as they (or their brands) are being re‐invoked elsewhere: soon, branches of these three universalist institutions will open their gates in the Gulf state of Abu Dhabi. This seems a premier example of how particular global imaginaries are currently being exported (rather than vernacularized) from Europe to a new cosmopolitan elite in the Arab world.

Returning to Hoelscher’s description of heritage as an exclusionist “faith”, quoted earlier (and see Lowenthal 1994: 49), clearly conceived with the nation or gated community in mind, we may ask: how does the recent global heritage turn differ? Assumingly, a world heritage perspective is inclusive, not exclusive, but how is such an alleged inclusion and consensus established or practised? Can we perhaps speak of a certain global or cosmopolitan “faith” in (world) heritage and cosmopolitan morality, which, though it seeks to include humanity as a whole through “banal” semantics, in fact works to silence those who may not share its universalist perspectives? ⁵ In other words, might global heritage aspirations be just as exclusionary as the narrower national ones? With this selection of articles, we seek to analyse empirically and historically informed ways in which certain discourses and practices of the global actually assemble themselves, take shape.

Locating Globalized Heritage

The articles in this issue spring from a seminar hosted by the Danish Research Schools of Anthropology and History at Aarhus University in December 2008. Several of the papers analyse Danish heritage issues and the ways in which these imply, challenge or otherwise relate to an imagined global community. Denmark seems an apt case in point for reflection over general issues concerning the national‐global tensions. A recently adopted policy of the ethnographic department of the National Museum of Denmark exemplifies well what we may call a “national globality”. In the face of economic cutbacks, the Copenhagen institution has decided to concentrate on “Danish traces”—that is, locations and ex‐colonies across the globe on which Danes have left their marks in the past—at the expense of its collections from other regions of the world. While such a prioritization may, on one level, be seen as complying with post‐colonial and reconciliatory stances towards ex‐colonies, on another level it seems to imply a curious set of national interests and assumptions and a particular understanding of what constitutes relevant knowledge for the museum’s present‐day Danish public. For all its globalness, this heritage policy seems to rest on profoundly national assumptions.

The first two contributions deal with recent projects which resulted from this Danish heritage policy. In the first article, Nathalia Brichet follows the National Museum of Denmark’s project to turn the former Danish colonial complex Frederiksgave in Ghana into a “common” heritage site shared between Denmark and Ghana. She focuses in particular on different interpretations of material artefacts, such as exhibits and tools for restoration, and shows how globalized heritage is neither common nor separate, but that it can be seen and theorized as a “zone of awkward engagement” (following Tsing 2005). Rather than being inhibitive, this inbuilt awkwardness, Brichet points out, is productive of new meanings, relations and developments. In a similar vein, in the small East Indian coastal town of Tranquebar—a former Danish trading station and the focus of Helle Jørgensen’s article—contemporary Danish interests in heritage preservation are entangled with local interests in development. Tranquebar is perceived as “remote”, both in global and local imaginaries, but turning Tranquebar into a “heritage town” is seen as one way of beginning to lift the place out of this remoteness and into “development”. Such understandings and hopes are widely shared by Jørgensen’s various informants, including Tranquebar locals as well as Danish agents involved in the heritage facelift of the town.

Another spot in which Danish researchers and heritage agents have been heavily involved with the development of heritage is the Arab Gulf state of Bahrain. In his article, Thomas Fibiger demonstrates how heritage authorities in Bahrain and foreign scientists as well as institutions such as UNESCO have collaborated to install a particular kind of heritage as global. In discussing this selectivity, and the institutional and political processes behind it, Fibiger points to a number of other “pasts”, important to various groups and actors in Bahrain, which could easily be said to qualify as global. He thus focuses on debates within Bahrain on which kinds of past should count as global and local, and on the processes of authority underlying the definition and management of global heritage in the Gulf state. The argument that transnational heritage issues are often the discursive domain of a particular elite is similarly central to Casper Andersen’s article on the late nineteenth‐century damming of the Nile in Upper Egypt. Andersen focuses on the discussion of the consequences for the ancient temple at the Philae island and shows how this debate, and, indeed, the decision regarding the future of the temple, was firmly in the hands of various British parties with stakes and interests in Egypt. More specifically, it was a discussion between engineers and intellectuals engaged in either contemporary modernization or heritage preservation. The article addresses the fact that in late Victorian Britain, the nature of the Empire’s “civilizing obligation” was hotly contested—in this case, voiced as a conflict between modernization and preservation—although not fundamentally questioned.

In Andersen’s contribution, the transnational heritage issues are debated and decided in foras of internationally oriented decision makers rather than local actors on the ground. This seems to be as much part of the global management of heritage today as it was in the nineteenth century, as Claske Vos points out in her article on Serbia’s “Europeanization” of certain aspects of its heritage. In the wake of the fall of Communism and the Balkan wars, Serbia has become part of the heritage programme of European organizations aiming at including the country in a European (imagined) community. What kinds of heritage and sites may be classified as European and how does bureaucracy operate to make heritage collaboration possible? Shedding empirically informed light on these questions, Vos demonstrates how European heritage is negotiated between local and centralized bureaucracy in the twenty‐first century.

However, the national perspective is rarely simply overridden or neglected in such negotiations of transnational or global heritage perspectives, whether it be in Serbia, Britain, Egypt, Bahrain, India, Ghana—or Denmark. In his article, Mads Daugbjerg discusses how heritage managers at a profoundly national site in Denmark—the Dybbøl battlefield site near the Danish/German border—have in recent years attempted to refashion the site in line with an increasingly cosmopolitan narrative, seeking to transform it into a neutral memorial of war “in general” rather than embracing a particularly Danish national perspective. However, Daugbjerg suggests, this new cosmopolitan agenda is riddled with difficulties and inconsistencies imbued in the formerly nationalized landscape. Analysing the interplay between site, hosts and visitors at Dybbøl, he argues that a “banal” nationalism (Billig 1995) is very much at work here, despite deliberate attempts to “not mention the nation”.

One of the keynote speakers at the research seminar in Denmark was Richard Handler, a distinguished contributor to academic analyses and debates on heritage during the last decades. In his afterword to this issue, Handler reflects on the cosmopolitan and universal nature of a dictionary, which, at the same time, represents a knowledge situated in a particular time and space. Using a review by Edward Sapir of an English–Yiddish Dictionary from 1916 as example, Handler moves on to discuss Sapir’s own position between the local and the global. He concludes that “in the world of human beings, only particularity is possible, despite our various aspirations for higher or more general truths”.

In line with Handler’s reminder, and as a whole, the present issue of History and Anthropology calls for empirical specificity and analytical detail when addressing global, inclusive or cosmopolitan heritage issues. Processes of exclusion, silencing and selection are not simply outdated operational tools of conventional national practices which we have somehow now left behind. Rather, the global heritage turn works to produce, instil and habituate not merely new friendships, reconciliations and mutual understandings, but also, as part of those very processes, new configurations of exclusion, silencing and selection. The case studies in this issue point to the tension and entanglement of local, national and global heritage processes. In this way we seek to contribute to what we hope is an ongoing debate about the “global” of globalized heritage.

Acknowledgements

This special issue is based on a research seminar organized by the Danish Research Schools of History and of Anthropology. The editors would like to thank the two research schools for their support and not least the three keynotes participating in the seminar; Sharon Macdonald, Eric Hirsch and Richard Handler. Moreover, we thank the contributors for their articles and for their comments to this introduction, as well as the anonymous peer reviewers for their comments and suggestions to the articles in this issue.

Notes

[1] David Lowenthal (1994: 43) reminds us that even earlier, the term heritage referred exclusively to aristocratic lineages and inherited positions of the privileged.

[2] The literature on cosmopolitanism has boomed over the last decade and includes important edited volumes by Cheah and Robbins (1998) and Vertovec and Cohen (2002) as well as a special issue of Public Culture edited by Pollock et al. (2000). Even more recently, anthologies edited by Werbner (2008a), Nowicka and Rovisco (2009) and Meskell (2009a) seek to engage specifically in the practicalities of cosmopolitanism, often by use of anthropological methods and field studies. Other significant voices include Appiah (2006), Benhabib (2006) and Beck (2000, 2002, 2004).

[3] For related criticism of Beck’s universalism, see Werbner (2008b).

[4] The declaration is reprinted and discussed in ICOM News, no. 1, 2004.

[5] The UNESCO report Our Creative Diversity (1995) provides an eloquent example of such a “banal globalism”.