Faith in Heritage examines the case of heritage development on Wutai Shan, one of China's four sacred Buddhist mountains and a UNESCO-listed World Heritage site since 2009. The book explores, in particular, the ironies, contradictions, and conflicts that emerge when UNESCO's ideals of heritage preservation mix with local state economic development priorities, tourism promotion, temple management strategies, and the rise of religious practices associated with pilgrimage. Shepherd's is primarily an ethnographic account of research conducted on Wutai Shan on several repeated trips between 2008 and 2011. His ostensible argument in the book is simply that, when considering the political tensions associated with heritage development, we cannot assume, on the one hand, a monolithic state acting with a single voice and purpose, or, on the other, a monolithic public resisting or otherwise at odds with that state. This, of course, will surprise no one who has spent any time in China recently. Far more interesting and valuable are Shepherd's observations about what people are actually doing at Wutai Shan. Here we find, for example, relocation and demolition in the name of preservation, construction and reconstruction of “preserved” temples, tourists worshipping Buddha while disclaiming any particular faith in Buddhism, and religious pilgrims disclaiming any association with tourism or interest in heritage.
Shepherd is at his best when laying bare the multiple ironies that one finds at a place like Wutai Shan. World Heritage status, he claims, launched a plan to transform Wutai Shan into a national park where a pure version of cultural heritage might be found unsullied by the contemporary commercial livelihoods of locals. He argues that this vision of pure culture derives – via UNESCO – from an earlier “wilderness ethic” of late nineteenth-century Euro-American modernity, with “culture” substituting for “nature” as the essence of a nation always under threat from modern civilization. The result has been the forced relocation of many of the residents of Taihuai, where the highest concentration of temples is found, to clear the way for a (yet to be) grassy “heritage park.” This is also the result, he argues, of a twentieth-century modernist tendency to emphasize spatial functional segregation in planning and design models. Even the farmland around Taihuai is being turned into parkland, planted with evergreen trees. A group of residents petitioned Beijing to halt their relocation, pointing out that it was they, after all, who built the temples, and who protected them from rampaging Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. How, they and Shepherd both ask, can they just be erased from the scene now?
Yet, even as residents are being removed and their houses, shops, and hotels being torn down, many temples themselves are undergoing a building boom to accommodate visitors, since temples will be the only source of accommodation in the national park, according to the Master Plan. Meanwhile, many town residents who have not yet been evicted are busy renovating and expanding their houses in an effort to increase their compensation rate when they eventually are forced to move (a phenomenon known as qiangjian, ‘snatching construction’). Contradictions like these interest Shepherd a great deal. He sees in the on-the-ground mess of Wutai Shan's heritage development the outcome of a more abstract set of contradictions in the World Heritage concept itself. Here, he echoes what has become a relatively established critique of the “Western” ideals of preservation and cultural pluralism – rooted in German Romanticism – embedded in UNESCO's policies: that the very idea of celebrating local cultural pluralism itself represents a very particular set of values that are specifically Euro-American and class-based. Thus, Shepherd argues that “UNESCO seeks to preserve the cultural diversity of the world in an era of globalization which is presumed to carry the eminent threat of cultural sameness, yet in doing so it mandates a specific spatial form of preservation that erases cultural differences and evokes and promotes the cultural sameness it fears” (p. 79). While it is difficult to disagree with this assessment, it seems that much more could be said about how UNESCO has in fact tried to respond to this critique over the past decade or so. Versions of Shepherd's story – and his critique – have been repeated in many places around the world, but it should also be pointed out that UNESCO has struggled to redefine World Heritage in new ways, to work more directly with communities in situations (generally not in China) where that is actually possible, and that a more complex reading of the organization is probably called for.
This is not to deny the value of Shepherd's critique itself, particular in relation to its focus on how the Chinese state (both in its central and local formations) uses heritage to advance not only an agenda of economic development, but also a broader and longer-term project of nation-building, moral pedagogy, and promotion of secular modernity. Here, though he doesn't put it in precisely these terms, heritage can be viewed as a technology of government. On Wutai Shan, a “sacred Buddhist mountain,” heritage planning focuses on the cultural, as opposed to religious, value of the site (whatever such a distinction might mean). In planning documents, signage, and interviews, Shepherd details a deliberate effort to redefine Wutai Shan as a heritage site where secular tourists will appreciate China's national cultural traditions, instead of engaging in “superstitious” religious practices as pilgrims. And yet, such practices occur regardless, as one would expect. Indeed, Shepherd argues that World Heritage has stimulated rather than repressed a booming religious economy at Wutai Shan. He conducted a survey among visitors in 2010 which indicated religion as the primary reason for visiting the area, a finding that was, interestingly, much more true of women than men.
What does all this mean, then, for how we, as social scientists, understand and interpret heritage tourism at religious sites like Wutai Shan? How do we sort out the distinctions between religious pilgrims, secular tourists, and a whole spectrum of behaviors in between these seemingly opposite categories of traveling subjectivity? Should we bother trying to classify Wutai Shan's visitors at all? Shepherd wrestles with these questions, arguing that such thorny issues are far from resolved in tourism scholarship. While I found his detours into tourism studies and theory to be, at times, difficult to follow and tending to lump together a range of different arguments under large umbrella terms like “postmodernism”, I did very much appreciate his empirical contribution to the debate. One interview, in particular, was instructive: to a group of Beijing men visiting Wutai Shan on their day off, Shepherd explores the ways they might identify themselves. They deny being “tourists”, and scoff at the idea that they might be “pilgrims” (“That's what old ladies do!”). But when asked if they'll burn incense at the temples, they reply “Of course! That's what people do in a temple.” “So would you say you're here to worship (baifo)?” Shepherd asks. “Baifo is baifo,” one replies, “That's the point of going to a temple, isn't it? But I'm not a Buddhist. This is a famous scenic spot.” This is probably my favorite part of the book, in that it makes clear the importance of focusing not on categories of behavior, but on actual practices in context. It also makes clear the slippery ways that religion, heritage, and tourism intermingle in actual places. By presenting us with a rich ethnographic study of visitor practices, resident conflicts, and official strategies, Shepherd's book will be of great value to scholars of tourism, religion, heritage, and development, not to mention China experts interested in the politics that these forces have brought.
