The economic and political weight acquired since the 1990s by the Asian, and more specifically, Southeast Asian heritage industry is reflected in the proliferation of academic publications, conferences and research projects on this subject. The latest example of this trend is the volume under review: the product of a four-year research project funded by the British Academy and the Association of Southeast Asian Studies in the United Kingdom, which focused on cultural and natural sites in the region that have been inscribed on UNESCO's coveted World Heritage List. When this project ended in 2013, there were thirty-six such sites (in the two intervening rounds of inscription four more regional sites were inscribed: in Myanmar, the Philippines, and Vietnam in 2014, and Singapore in 2015). Each country in the region also listed sites for future possible inscription as well as cultural practices, which UNESCO categorises as ‘intangible cultural heritage’ — even though intangibility does not preclude commercialisation.
This weighty volume contains 15 case studies in addition to the editor's introduction and Michael Hitchcock's postscript. The contributing authors deal with Angkor, Cambodia (Keiko Miura); Ayutthaya, Thailand (Roberto Gozzoli); Luang Prabang, Laos (chapters by Annabel Vallard and Sigrid Lenaerts); Hoi An and Phong Nha-Ke Bang Nature Reserve, Vietnam (chapters by Michael J.G. Parnwell and Vu Hong Lien); Vigan and Palawan, the Philippines (chapters by Erik Akpedonu and Johanna K. Froß); Melaka, Penang and the Kinabalu and Gunung Mulu Natural Parks, Malaysia (chapters by, respectively, Victor T. King, Ooi Keat Gin, and Janet Cochrane); Muara Jambi, Bali, Prambanan and Borobodur, and four natural parks in Java, Sumatra, Nusa Tenggara and Papua, Indonesia (chapters by, respectively, Fiona Kerlogue, Keiko Miura and I Made Sarjana; Michael Hitchcock and I Nyoman Darma Putra; and, again, Janet Cochrane).
The volume thus offers a fairly comprehensive coverage both in terms of geographical location and type of site (the research programme covered, in fact, all of Southeast Asia's World Heritage sites). Most of the essays follow, however, established conceptual and methodological approaches: quantitative analysis of official statistics and questionnaire responses, in some cases supplemented by tourist blog postings; qualitative analysis of textual materials providing site interpretation; the identification of tourism as the necessary evil heritage conservators and policy-makers must deal with in pursuing the diverging objectives of protection and valorisation.
King's Introduction tables, in fairly dry sociological prose, the main issues at stake, from commercial exploitation to ideological mobilisation, from centralist policies to the involvement of local communities in site management — issues that have been debated for at least two decades. King does not attempt to outline a novel analytical framework for examining UNESCO's process of evaluation and inscription of sites, in which non-Western states now play the dominant role (see, for instance, the forum on the politics behind the inscription of Cambodia's sites published in Current Anthropology [57, 1: 2016: 72–95]), and also avoids discussing insights from ‘critical heritage studies’, which offer a more theoretically and politically engaged position vis-à-vis praxis-oriented ‘heritage studies’. Indeed, King says of the research programme that generated the volume that it ‘has a wide-ranging academic, conceptual and empirical focus, but also seeks to present findings and recommendations which will feed into policy, management and decision-making about these sites’ (pp. 8–9).
This latter, advisory concern is more prominent in the contributions by Lenaerts, Akpedonu, Miura, Hitchcock and Darma Putra, and Froß, whose narrower analytical scope focuses on the gains and challenges posed by inscription on the World Heritage List. The remaining essays tend to examine the domestic process leading to a site's nomination to UNESCO for inscription, and the tensions and conflicts this process generated between the various parties (government officials, tourism operators, local villagers or urban dwellers) involved. Among the latter group of essays, especially illuminating are those by King on Melaka, Kerlogue on Muara Jambi, Miura and Sarjana on Bali, and Cochrane on Indonesia's natural World Heritage sites. In his postscript Hitchcock does little more than summarise the chapters’ main points before concluding that ‘despite problems of the kind recorded in this volume, thirst for UNESCO recognition in both cultural and natural respects remain undiminished and it seems likely that almost all the Southeast Asian states will continue to submit applications’ (p. 385).
It is a pity that the volume's research timeline did not make it possible to include a discussion of Singapore's Botanic Gardens (a composite of cultural and natural site). The desire to have the Gardens listed motivated the city-state's re-joining of UNESCO, from which Singapore had withdrawn in 1985 (together with the United States and United Kingdom), and also becoming party to the 1972 World Heritage Convention, whose mandate contrasts with Singapore's urban policies from the 1970s to the present day — as demonstrated by the government's decision to demolish Bukit Brown cemetery despite uncharacteristically vocal opposition from civil society.
In conclusion, this volume contains valuable field data and analyses, and is significant by virtue of its focus on World Heritage sites in Southeast Asia. Its limitations lie in the contributors’ renunciation of innovative methodological, analytical and theoretical approaches to match the volume's regional concerns. This volume is also revealing about the dynamics of collective research projects supported by large grants, which have become the modus operandi of the British and European academe, as much as about its ostensible subject matter. Among the volume's fifteen contributors, nine are British or European, one a Japanese, and five Southeast Asian — only three of whom are the sole authors of their essays. Of course, this imbalance should not be overstated, for all the contributors have considerable familiarity with the region and some are even based there. It remains to be seen too how the analyses and practical recommendations in this volume will be received by Southeast Asian conservators, tourism entrepreneurs and policy-makers, who define and negotiate the meaning and value of heritage sites — whether or not they are on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
