Daryle Williams
Department of History
University of Maryland
 

Cultural patrimony delimits national territories in space and time. It reifies national memories, canonizes national cultural traditions, and monumentalizes national heroes. Patrimonial "goods," be they tangible or intangible, play an integral role in the cultural and political processes associated with state-building. They justify the existence of agencies, laws, and professionals charged with the protection of the national cultural patrimony. Nationalist causes legitimate themselves in the defense of sites and artifacts imperiled by the ravages of time, violence, oblivion, foreigners, and "bad" citizens. Social movements that organize around cultural preservation are powerful mechanisms in the identity politics of national belonging. Patrimony and nation, in short, share vital life support systems.

The interdependence of patrimony and nation, however intimate, is tested by the addition of descriptors such as "universal," "global," and "world" to patrimonial goods known historically as "national" cultural treasures. Supranational claims to cultural patrimony are not entirely new. The Catholic faith, the Great Books, and négritude are supranational cultural artifacts that organize transnational protectionist movements. National patrimony, nonetheless, has acquired new meanings—and new politics—in the late twentieth-century phenomenon known as globalization. The 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (a.k.a. the World Heritage Convention) and other international agreements concerning the identification and defense of "world heritage" (Span: patrimonio de la humanidad; Port: patrmiônio da humanidade) has been especially instrumental in reconfiguring the historical intimacy between nations and their theretofore inalienable heritage.

So, we ask, how do nations maintain claims to cultural and political sovereignty if heritage sites located within national borders are designated of exceptional universal value? Do the signatories of the World Heritage Convention effectively relinquish control over national treasures when they submit to the rules that govern global heritage? How do social movements that have historically worked within a language of national cultural patrimony adapt to a shifting socio-cultural landscapes in which claims to universal heritage originate in local and foreign governments, multilateral financial institutions, and transnational advocacy networks as well as the central state? The cultural nationalist (and the historian of cultural nationalism) who takes world heritage seriously is left to ask whether the advent of a multilocal politics of world heritage threatens to rend apart the historical interdependence of the national and the patrimonial.

With the financial assistance of the Programa de Investigaciones Socioculturales en el Mercosur-Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social (Buenos Aires, Argentina) and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (University of Maryland, USA), I am currently in engaged in a research project that explores the historical problem of world heritage among the Mercosur/Mercosul charter members (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay). The early stages of this cultural archeology of world heritage have been devoted to an archival excavation of the Jesuit-Guaraní missions, the premier world heritage site(s) of the Mercosur/sul bloc and an exemplary case study of the complexities of "national" heritage in global culture.

The early stages of archival research— conducted at the Brazilian Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional; the Argentine Comisión Nacional de Museos, Monumentos, y Lugares Históricos; regional archives in Misiones, Argentina and Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil; and the Library of Congress—have turned upon four interrelated problems: