Race and Cultural Heritage

Anthropological studies of race and studies of cultural heritage, while related, are rarely in direct conversation. Indeed, the parallels between the development of cultural heritage discourse and theory alongside the debates over the concept of race evidence the pervasiveness of both terms throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. Cultural heritage, along with ethnicity, in many ways has come to replace race as a means of describing and explaining cultural, social, and historical differences. The origin of the term “cultural heritage” is rooted in material objects and the built environment and the idea of inheritance, or the passing down through generations of physical objects and goods collectively considered valuable and valued. Heritage, nowadays, includes both tangible things (i.e., baskets) and intangible practices (i.e., the knowledge of basket-making). Critical heritage studies focuses on the social and political processes by which political and social elites, whether government officials, scholars, or cultural leaders, deem certain objects and practices worthy of being categorized as heritage. This process can be deliberate and intentional, such as through official government-led heritage-designation programs, or it can unfold more indirectly over time and by means of reputation. International institutions such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) have developed protocols and guidelines for the recognition and maintenance of heritage sites globally, with the UNESCO “World Heritage” list as the most well-known and, arguably, the most controversial. These efforts to lay claim to a shared “world” value for specific heritage sites are intended, in large part, both to transcend the divisiveness of race and racialized identities, and also to assert a shared “humanity” across political borders while celebrating social, historical, and cultural differences. The idea of certain cultural objects, places, and/or practices as worthy of “world heritage” designation, however, inadvertently and inevitably reinforces ideas of cultural hierarchy and worth on a broader scale. Race and cultural heritage collide, therefore, in moments when the codification of culture into heritage, made manifest in individual, singular physical, tangible objects and places, becomes regarded as representative of an entire social community, historical experience, and/or cultural group. Advances in genetic research and mainstream commercial ancestry tests also raise new questions about the relationship between race and heritage. Recent developments in “heritage tourism,” efforts to decolonize museums, protests spurred by or directed at monuments, and efforts to eliminate or assimilate entire cultural groups through the destruction of heritage sites reveal how ideas of race and racialized difference continue to inform the workings of cultural heritage in the early 21st century.