A few years ago, I reviewed Rodney Harrison’s edited work, Understanding the Politics of Heritage (Open University, 2009), for this forum, and now it is my mandate to assess his single-authored book, Heritage: Critical Approaches (Routledge, 2013). In this work, Harrison has reconfigured much of his previously published material. He has also produced a more historically oriented work, one that will be of immense benefit to students seeking background information on the emergence of the Heritage Studies field, educators needing a source for specifics on World Heritage decisions, and culture brokers interested in how specific case studies influenced and transformed the World Heritage Committee’s basic tenets and philosophies. In what follows, I take each of these positive attributes in turn, and then shift focus to address what I consider to be the more problematic areas of Harrison’s work.

Those unfamiliar with the field will learn a great deal from the author’s explication of the foundations of Heritage Studies. His portrayal of the damage done to archaeological landmarks and historic architectural sites in Europe as a result of World War II, and his exposé of the expressed desire to create a document that would lay out the importance and value of preserving what remained—not only for Europeans but for people around the globe—motivate readers to learn more. Noteworthy, for instance, is the fact that the World Heritage Convention of 1972 emerged as part of a broader trend in Europe to establish mechanisms and policies that would, it was hoped, go some distance toward insuring peace. During this general period, in tandem with the World Heritage Committee, which was formed in 1978, organizations like UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and OCOMOS (The International Council on Monuments and Sites) bolstered the idea that the second half of the twentieth century would be better than the first.

Noteworthy throughout Harrison’s work, but especially in the early chapters, is his remarkable command of sources. He references books and articles by historians, folklorists, anthropologists, sociologists, and scholars of Heritage Studies. In addition, he interlaces his book with specifics regarding many of the crucial documents and published reports that resulted from United Nations and World Heritage Committee conferences and meetings. How the initial critique of the state’s use and interpretation of heritage arose; how the word “heritage” itself emerged within consumer studies and tourism studies; how the term was deemed to have lost its meaning (and perhaps its way), and how it broadened under the watchful eye of archaeologists and others interested in expanding heritage’s scope: these are some of the topics Harrison explores. Most compelling is his discussion of heritage and memory (chapter 8). Selecting for analysis the bureaucratic snafus that resulted in the destruction of the Great and Little Buddhas of the Bamiyan Valley of Afghanistan, Harrison outlines in vivid description and photographic detail the globalized importance of “absent heritage.”

Repeatedly noting how the notion of Cartesian dualism informed the World Heritage Convention’s philosophy, Harrison critiques the idea of the mind/body split. He also eschews the modernist tendency to categorize and classify. Their continuance, he claims, impedes seriously the World Heritage Committee’s ability to embrace an all-encompassing understanding of heritage and to free itself from hegemonic structures. Although adjustments and modifications to the Convention’s foundational ideas have been made (as a result of challenges from Indigenous groups and concerned stakeholders alike), Harrison promulgates a more holistic model of heritage, one that would hark to a myriad set of voices and utterances that might be able to produce more egalitarian and salubrious results.

In terms of a non-hierarchical ideal, the promoter of this radical new notion of heritage endorses the concept of the “hybrid forum” (Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe 2011), which is “based on a model of heritage [that is] inherently dialogical and [which] has important implications for [understanding] the future of heritage as more open, inclusive, representational, and creative” (225). Such support is unsurprising in light of the author’s aforementioned critique of dualistic and hierarchical structures. What Harrison proceeds to recommend, however, is the nonhuman “affective” agency of things, or, in his words, “the charismatic or enchanting qualities of objects, their ability to engage the senses, as well as their ability to act in ways that are both integral to, and generative of, human behavior, or, even in ways that are person-like, either in conjunction with, or independently of, persons themselves” (221). Making this move, Harrison aligns with New Materialism theorists like Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (2010), who argue that matter is alive and agentive. Bruno Latour’s (2005) actor network theory (ANT), a method for exploring relational links in a network, is added, as is the ecological humanitarianism of Deborah Bird Rose (2004), and the Amerindian ontology of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2004).

Despite Harrison’s attempts to interlock all of these perspectives within his triadic vision of “connection, materiality, and dialogue,” missing are answers to salient questions of practice. In the case studies he scrutinizes, for instance, who paid, when, where, and for what? How was power neutralized in real time and in real situations? How were failures in communication and/or dialogue addressed and/or corrected?

There are additional flaws to Heritage: Critical Approaches. First, it is actually three books in one. It is a history of the field of Heritage Studies (still in its infancy); a series of case studies demonstrating how challenges were made to the definitional canon of heritage; and an urgent call to action in which author Rodney Harrison promotes the “ontology of connectivity,” his vision of heritage that is purportedly able to escape the grip of its former and present ideologies.

Second, although Harrison promotes a highly ambitious agenda, it is one that is only partially successful, arguably because the author is unclear as to his audience. His historical focus would be ideal for undergraduates; his case study approach, for graduates; his theoretical one, for scholars and practitioners alike. Rarely, however, do all three groups converge to consume the same set of materials.

Third, and this critique implicates the aforesaid: Harrison’s terms should be carefully glossed and/or defined. Readers may be unfamiliar with words like musealization, apparatus, dispositif, and ontology. We “in the know” may be on the same page as the author, but students and laywomen and men who come to the book with the interest of the uninitiated may not. Finally, this book suffers from extreme redundancy and a gross lack of editing. Tightening prose, eliminating repetition, and re-reading words and passages carefully should be at the forefront of tasks assigned for the second edition.

Undoubtedly, with Heritage: Critical Approaches, Rodney Harrison’s place in the discipline of Heritage Studies is secure; he has only to match his rich knowledge of the field’s background with a more careful organization and delineation of his theoretical ideas.

Works Cited

Callon, M., P. Lascoumes, and Y. Barthe. 2011. Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Coole, D., and S. Samantha Frost. 2010. The New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press.

Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rose, D. B., and L. Robin. 2004. “The Ecological Humanities in Action: An Invitation,” Australian Humanities Review 31-32. http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-April-2004/rose.html

Viveiros de Castro, E. B. 2004. “The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies,” Common Knowledge 10:463-485.

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[Review length: 1226 words • Review posted on April 8, 2015]