Charlotte Joy’s book is an ethnographic work that comes at the right time, when issues of heritage, tourism, and sustainability have become highly pressing across the African continent. The rise of terrorist movements in West Africa and new epidemics have made cultural heritage resources and tourism particularly vulnerable in this region. It is in this broad contextual frame that this book has been written on Djenné, a historical and religious town in Mali, put on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1988. Combining ethnographies of everyday life and institutional analysis, Joy aims to problematize and deconstruct international discourses of authenticity and sustainability, especially in Africa where Western epistemic conceptualizations often do not apply without ambiguities. She states that UNESCO’s criteria utilized in this site have been focused on monumentality and the materiality of objects, foregrounding the historical and aesthetic values of Djenné. This, she argues, overshadows the basic needs of local communities in their daily lives and struggles against poverty in many regards. Joy’s agenda is orientated to remapping heritage priorities, to giving attention to constituents living with and within the tangible spaces, and to redressing power structures underpinning the heritage hierarchy.
Her work is divided into two parts, with a total of nine chapters. Part I, comprising chapters 1, 2, and 3, talks about the official heritage discourses and the institutional interventions of UNESCO, NGOs, and the Malian government. It is also concerned with historiographical representations that European scholars have had on Djenné. The second part, which encompasses the remaining chapters and thus occupies the largest portion of the book, is devoted to the intangible dimension of the heritage, clearly spotlighting life stories of known individuals, events linked to heritage, and everyday challenges encountered by both heritage professionals and local constituents. These chapters are organized coherently to support the author’s main claims and conclusions fleshed out throughout the book.
Chapters 1, 2, and 3 provide an overview of the scholarly anthropological representations of Djenné, along with explorers’ and missionaries’ travel reports, before and, more importantly, during the nineteenth century. She shows how the debates about the architectural and historical significance of Djenné are shaped by diffusion theories and other arguments. The author discusses UNESCO’s origin, structure, mission, and the contradictions and conceptual adaptations in the course of its existence. Attention is given to the nomination processes and the non-reclamatory attitude of local communities who seem to be more interested in the financial aspect than in the symbolic or aesthetic questions.
Throughout the second part, her methodological shift from monumentality and materiality to an anthropological perspective becomes crystal clear. Her contextualized approach permits her to dissect the complex picture of the heritage site, not simply as object-centered, but as an embodied space where people from different social backgrounds, with multiple identities, interact and negotiate their stakes in the heritage resources. She looks at grassroots organizations, local people’s conceptions of authenticity as opposed to those of some tourists and professionals, and how they subvert international recognition to advance their own economic interests. Tensions emanating from the Western epistemological and cultural encounters, often incarnated by tourists and tourist guides, with local indigenous people, and lay versus elite perspectives, are given due consideration. She concludes that the heritage system in Djenné is elitist, monolithic, and exclusionary. Perspectival nuances, different meanings of sustainability, and what she calls a top-down imposition, mine the heritage project since they simplify the mosaic nature of local needs and daily struggles for survival. To illustrate her argument, Joy analyzes the Djenné festival in which she participated as an organizer, which allowed her to possess first-hands accounts. She claims here that corruption, politicization, and power relations constitute the major problems, which undermine an equal sharing of heritage benefits. Overall, she suggests a rethinking or a revision of original criteria that need to privilege the linkage between heritage and community development.
The strengths of Joy’s work reside in her participant-observation methodology and in her emphasis on intimacy with informants, who, in the long run, became friends and confidantes. If any, the weakness would be her overgeneralizations about certain local practices such as corruption as a “pan-African” pathology. Her binary view of bottom-up and top-down is also problematic, because either way, actors meet and negotiate their relationships. Her use of currency conversions between the British pound and CFA franc needs to be revised to avoid disproportionate comparisons, revealing a Western understanding of local situations. Her book is a must-read for Africanists and heritage specialists from various humanistic disciplines, such as anthropology, history, folkloristics, sociology, and archeology.
--------
[Review length: 752 words • Review posted on December 17, 2014]