Described, Inscribed, Written Off: Heritagisation as (Dis)connection

Abstract

In 2011, UNESCO inscribed the fourteenth-century Citadel of the Hồ Dynasty in Vietnam's Thanh Hòa Province on the World Heritage List, thereby both recognising and rewarding Vietnam's efforts in conserving the archaeological site, as well as obliging it to meet UNESCO's official conservation standards. In an article titled 'Hồ Citadel the Site of a Modern Conflict' in the English-language newspaper Việt Nam News of 8 June 2014, Deputy Director of the Centre for Conservation of the Hồ Dynasty Citadel World Heritage, Nguyễn Xuân Toán, lamented that local people continued to 'build houses and other civil works' in the area, in violation of conservation regulations, and in spite of awareness-raising meetings. The district authorities do not wish to forbid construction of houses within certain limits, but have a plan for the gradual removal of cultivation fields from the site, and according to journalist Hồng Thúy, local people would be happy to move if they receive adequate compensation. The conflict referred to in the title is, therefore, not just a conflict between the Conservation Centre and local people, but between the centre and the district authorities, with Mr Toán complaining that 'the Centre for Conservation of the Hồ Dynasty Citadel World Heritage does not have the authority to mete out punishments on violators when CONNECTED & DISCONNECTED IN VIET NAM 312 they detect infringement of the site'. Mr Toán is supported by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism in Hanoi: 'Management and preservation at the site will not improve unless the centre's power is enhanced, said Deputy Director of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism's Cutural Heritage Department, Nguyễn Quốc Hùng'. 1 The news report construes this as a conflict between two government agencies-district authorities and heritage management authorities-but the conflict is over the power to evict local inhabitants whose livelihood practices are, since 2011, branded 'an infringement of the site'; local people are enemies of conservation. 313 9. DESCRIBED, INSCRIBED, WRITTEN OFF 2 Debord's book contains 221 numbered paragraphs of varying length-from one sentence to half a page-and it is to these paragraphs that I refer. There exist many different English translations of this book, which is notoriously difficult to translate. I use two different translations (Debord 1994, 2002).

Introduction: Heritagizing Asian cities: space, memory, and vernacular heritage practices

“…And all heritage has to be enacted and somehow materialised -including all intangible cultural heritage. The papers in this collection show how such instantiations of vernacular heritage revolve around, and play with, mutually constitutive poles of loss and evocation or redemption; of forgetting and remembering (Connerton 1989(Connerton , 2009; of erasure and re-construction (or redemption) (Nora 1989); or in more general terms, of absenting and presencing (Macdonald 2013;Salemink 2016). These are not absolute binaries, but rather inter-connected, mutually constitutive poles that presuppose and evoke each other, especially in the context of the process of heritagization.…”

Reframing Pilgrimage in Northern Europe: Introduction to the Special Issue

“…For the religious field, the development toward a heritagization of religion can be seen on a global scale with regard to diverse phenomena such as religious sites inscribed in the UNESCO list (Salemink 2016), cathedral spaces (Coleman and Bowman 2019; Mikaelsson 2019), religious theme parks (Paine 2019) or the wealth of abandoned religious buildings that are now being prepared for a new future as cultural heritage all over Europe by broadly based coalitions such as Future for Religion Heritage (FRH 2014). In pilgrimage, now widely reinstitutionalized and conceptually framed as cultural heritage, we can see "a hugely dynamic process that sustains the significance of certain sites, forgets the sacrality of others, brings new places into the orbit of the sacred, and transforms and contests the meanings of other sites and routes" (Edensor 2016: 209).…”

How to Be a Pilgrim: Guidebooks on the Norwegian St. Olav Ways and the Heritagization of Religion

“…Processes of heritagization trigger complex dynamics, not least within the religious field (Meyer and de Witte 2013;Salemink 2016;Rots and Teeuwen 2020). With UNESCO's category of "heritage of religious interest," applied from 2010 onwards, religious traditions gain new and broader ownership, practices acquire new meaning, and long-abandoned sites or "sacred landscapes" become "religious property," bound to a usage that accounts for this status.1 The European pilgrimage revival of recent decades is another striking example of the dynamics of this ongoing "heritagization of religion" (Bowman and Sepp 2019).…”