This volume is a welcome, significant addition to the literature on global heritage studies. Divided into four sections — on conservation, politics and governance of heritage, remembrance and loss, and modernity and globalisation respectively — preceded by short introductions, the book is truly interdisciplinary, written by 27 specialists working in the fields of heritage management, conservation, anthropology, history, architecture, urban planning, geography, art history, sociology, and ecology. Given the enormous scope of the subject, the book presents an admirably ‘expansive’ coverage of topics (p. 4). Some of the core themes are: the challenges facing conservation efforts; tourism; geneaologies of the notions of heritage — a continually contested, negotiated, and redefined concept — as well as the history of the evolution of regulations; the prevalence of Western ideas regarding heritage including through the colonial legacy that not only created a network of institutions and academic disciplines, but also redefined monuments and altered community relationships; the dynamic between ‘universal value’ as defined by UNESCO and local perspectives; the impact of ideologies ranging from Orientalism and Romanticism to nationalism; state-driven, top-down policies regarding heritage; globalisation; and urbanisation.
In the introductory chapter the editors Patrick Daly and Tim Winter write that ‘the book aims to offer alternative ways of thinking about the production, conservation, and governance of culture and nature in Asia by exploring the unfolding complexities that surround the use of heritage as a term, set of values or concept today’ (p. 4). They highlight Asia's immense cultural and natural diversity and its rapid contemporary change including economic development and urbanisation, as well as recent shifts in the way states ‘negotiate their national histories and how they appropriate cultural pasts and natural environments within strategies of governance and identity making’ (pp. 4, 6). Daly and Winter include a brief overview of the evolution of concepts, including that of ‘sustainability’, which bear upon the construction of ‘heritage’ as an internationally accepted and institutionalised, albeit continually reconstructed, idea. Considering cultural and natural heritage together, the editors note, is one of the ways in which the book challenges assumptions defining policy and research on heritage (p. 12). It would have been helpful if the editors expanded here as to how else the book addresses such assumptions. For instance, many of the chapters symbiotically consider tangible and intangible heritage together, in discussing topics ranging from sacred sites and cultural memory to conflict resolution, ecological heritage, ‘Red Tourism’ and martial arts. As Robyn Bushell and Russell Staiff write: ‘the distinction between tangible, intangible and living heritage denies the complexity of shifting heritage discourse’ (p. 250). Bushell and Staiff also call for ‘seeing conservation and development as entangled processes within living places with (plural) heritages’ (p. 247). Likewise Ken Taylor argues that for an inclusive approach integrating ‘the concept of urban heritage conservation’ and ‘city development and expansion’ together (p. 277).
Colonial legacy is a key theme. That only 28, or 3 per cent, of World Heritage sites are in India, Himanshu Prabha Ray points out in an illuminating chapter, is a result of European ideas of ‘linear history and chronology’ underpinning the criteria used for assessing the ‘outstanding universal value of sites’ (p. 69). Under colonial rule monuments were redefined from religious structures to artistic and aesthetic objects, and ‘multi-religious sites’ turned into ‘mono-religious monuments’, entailing the loss of the ‘multicultural past’ (pp. 69, 73). In a lucid ‘meditation on the various dimensions of Buddhism's material legacy’, Maurizio Peleggi also underlines how colonial archaeologists and their postcolonial disciples alike ‘musealised’ Buddhist monuments but also cautiously credits colonial regimes for preserving monuments and uncovering their historical origins and studying stylistic evolution, notwithstanding all the attendant problems such as distortion in meaning, loss of cultural memory, and theft, given that ‘popular piety alone’ was unlikely to save the monuments (p. 63). In this regard Denis Byrne notes that there are ‘few in-depth studies’ of what he terms ‘alternative, indigenous conservation practices’ (p. 295).
The topic of tourism runs throughout the book and is analysed from multiple angles, such as in association with the pressures of development and globalisation, state policies, and local expectations as well as lived experiences. In assessing the impact of tourism on Luang Prabang — well covered in the book from varied approaches — David Berliner insightfully argues that the town has become a ‘nostalgiascape’ corresponding to a ‘yearning for the past resulting in consumption’ by Asian and other tourists alike for different reasons (p. 235). Lynne Marie Dearborn and John Charles Stallmeyer's Inconvenient heritage: Erasure and global tourism in Luang Prabang (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2010) should be included in the bibliography for this chapter.
Byrne makes the important argument that the relative absence of popular religion — a critical issue in heritage in Asia — in heritage literature, in spite of its recent resurgence, is due in part to its history of ‘active suppression and marginalisation in Asia itself’ including by specialists disinclined to consider popular religion to be worthy of protection (pp. 295, 307). Byrne's short definition of popular religion or folk religion in China as encompassing ‘cults to local deities and natural divine forces’ that regulate human interactions with places and things in daily life is less than satisfying for readers not well acquainted with the phenomenon and would want to know, for example, that it may include popular variants of Taoism with its multitudes of deities such as the protagonists of the historical novel Romance of the three kingdoms (pp. 296, 298). Byrne provides a much fuller definition for Thailand and Cambodia, and presents a compelling example of the process of national historical construction of Sukhothai and the resulting lack of visibility of local beliefs in guardian deities animating the ruins (pp. 300–3).
There are minor issues with the book. The editors' nuanced reasoning that, considering the diversity and complexity of Asia reflected in its historically fluid boundaries, they have ‘intentionally avoided ascribing too hard and fast a definition of what constitutes Asia as a region’ is contradicted by its blurb, which states that the book covers ‘the entire region’ of Asia, which is potentially misleading, since no chapter treats Central Asia, for one (p. 6). It would have been nice to include some coverage of language, spoken or written, a critically urgent issue of heritage. However, one can learn a tremendous amount from this book which, among other things, includes exhaustive bibliographies. With its innovative and cohesive scholarship, it makes for an indispensable volume for heritage studies and related fields such as social policy, religion, tourism, history, and urban planning.
