To conclude, let me return to what constitutes a heritage regime and how to go about its investigation. Heritage is a project of ideology that is dependent on am-bivalent temporal entanglements. Its conceptualization depends on modernity’s sense that the present needs to re-forge links with a past that appears to be severed and lost in the changing world. Value-laden in nature, heritage alludes to preserva-tion and celebrapreserva-tion of past elements of a reified culture that is intended to mani-fest ethnicity, locality and history; and yet, the cultural politics involved with herit-age proposes to address the concerns of the present, with a foreseeable perspective for the future. However, like all terms in the discourse of culture, heritage is an abstraction, and what it signifies is subject to interpretation and evaluation that may fluctuate between positive and negative over time and through space.
The deconstruction of an international “authorized heritage” regime seems an obvious, though perhaps also the easiest undertaking. It is not too difficult to point out the arbitrariness and contingencies in heritage production, while it has recently become rather widespread to partake in the deconstructive academic analysis of UNESCO programs as an infamous example of cultural engineering. But what kind of agency will be gained or lost as a result of such an academic exercise? What is the moral agenda of this investigation and critique? The descriptive, explanatory attitude towards the act of contrivance in order to unveil the bureaucratic manipu-lation of “innocent” communities (of practitioners) continues unavoidably to as-sume normative dimensions such as social criticism and prescribed political com-mitment. Perhaps based on Utopian longings or even in defense of treasured ide-als, this view, nevertheless, seems to regard “culture” and those who act in it to be drifters deficient of will in a “timeless” space. From such a perspective, heritage
“happens” to people and not with people. In my view, however, the heritagization process is cultural and polyvalent. It is happening as part of the 21st century condi-tion of global processes that resonate in the making of the local and should be studied from a multi-sited perspective (cf. Marcus 1998).
Having that in mind, my suggestion is to take the situated character of globaliza-tion seriously also in the critical study of heritage regimes, despite their seemingly common mechanism on an abstract level. While considering the contended per-ceptions of globalism, Anna Tsing has asked anthropologists to extend their study of communities as narrowly defined social spheres to a wider-ranging scope of (transnational) networks, social movements and state policies (Tsing 2002: 472).
Transnational and global networks glossed as “universal” tendencies need to be ethnographically studied to unravel encounters, trajectories and engagements.
Nevertheless, such processes with their global implications should not be observed simply as cases of imposed hegemony or self-evident homogenization: Global phenomena may unify, but they also show local cultural divergence (Tsing 2002:
477).
Richard Handler has contended that cultural processes (such as heritage cura-tion) are inherently particular and particularizing, so it would be unjustified to ex-pect the reverberations and effect of a global policy to function and produce simi-lar results under diverse circumstance (Handler 2002). An anthropological ap-proach advocates an investigation that utilizes different perspectives to contribute to our understanding of the social world by complicating simplicities. Concrete cases will benefit from being studied from a multi-sited perspective (as suggested by George Marcus 1998), which analyzes decision-making on various levels: inter-national, national and particularly local. Thus this “local” also needs to be studied and analyzed as a multi-sited field.
Research on communities will penetrate deeper if investigated as particularities.
Different circumstances make communities of people perceive and employ the emergent potential of recognized agency and the acknowledgment of their cultural rights differently. The claim of universality is found fault with as embodying West-ern values and codes of behavior that are perceived to be similarly interpreted and ready for application everywhere with insufficient consideration of the local expe-rience. Critical concerns voiced in this respect suggest instead that communities and their insider experience should be involved in studies that employ pluralist approaches (cf. Messer 1997). It seems important not only to elucidate negative experience and the violation of rights, but also to define and investigate moments of empowerment, real instances of emergent agency, and situations where local actors partake in grassroots policy-making. “Universal” rights acquire meaning as they are applied in local variation. Therefore, carefully explored particularities should help us complicate the simplicity of a detached universalism of criticizing an institutional regime.
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