The UNESCO World Heritage Convention of 1972 set the contemporary standard for cultural and natural conservation. Today, a place on the World Heritage List is much sought after for tourism promotion, development funding, and national prestige. Presenting case studies from across the globe, particularly from Africa and Asia, anthropologists with situated expertise in specific World Heritage sites explore the consequences of the World Heritage framework and the global spread of the UNESCO heritage regime. This book shows how local and national circumstances interact with the global institutional framework in complex and unexpected ways. Often, the communities around World Heritage sites are constrained by these heritage regimes rather than empowered by them.

"...this excellent book provides thoughtful critiques of UNESCO, state organizations, developers, and the tourist bureaus that translate and reconfigure UNESCO policies in glocalizing ways. Several chapters interrogate the category of `World Heritage' and at times seek to unsettle some of the taken-for-granted Euro-North American `humanist' and `enlightenment' ideologies that arguably underpin the UNESCO project. Whilst research into the distances between the discourses of World Heritage, the experiences of local stakeholders, and `local' subjects is not new, this volume offers an original take on the extant literature through its very intimate portrayals of local subjects." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI)

Christoph Brumann is Head of Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, and Honorary Professor of Anthropology at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. David Berliner is Professor of Anthropology at the Universite libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.