International intangible cultural heritage policy in the neighbourhood: an assessment and case study of Indonesia

UNESCO’s heritage policies are one of the most extensive global drivers of landscape and cultural transformation and investment. In response to complaints about Western and object-focussed bias in World Heritage, a push within UNESCO generated a new convention and a new category of heritage: intangible cultural heritage (ICH). Maligned by academic critics, it has nonetheless been an incredibly widespread program internationally with over 170 states signed up to its convention and subject to its obligations. This article provides an assessment of the geographical reach and impact of UNESCO’s ICH program, and, through a case study in Indonesia, analysis of its most successful (according to the Indonesian Directorate of Culture) program for the production of batik cloth. Through the case study, I assess the impact of the ICH policy in Indonesia at different levels and for different groups, the scales it has enabled, and its impact on historical batik landscapes.     

Counter-narratives of coping and becoming: Karen refugee women’s inside/outside figured worlds

The purpose of our research is to understand the socially and culturally constructed architecture within which refugee women produce and negotiate identity. This ethnographic case study discusses findings from data collected through participant observation and informal interviews in two refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border. As Karen refugee women described their positionality within and negotiation between the socially constructed Inside and Outside Figured Worlds of the refugee camp, they depict the negotiation of a hybrid Third Space. Created at the intersection of the refugee camp structures that dominate individual agency and the discourses of gender and displacement that influence the social practices of women, this third space is characterized by the response strategies Karen women engage to support individual, family, and community health. Within the transformational spaces that refugee women constructed, the processes of coping and becoming reflected the relationship between structure and agency. Within these intersections a woman could express her resistance to a system that in its design represented a majority she was not a part of. As Karen refugee women moved to redesign their position within these systems, shifts in meaning of cultural norms resulted, inclusive of those that influence or define the role of women.     

Heritage designation and scale: a World Heritage case study of the Ningaloo Coast

As heritage research has engaged with a greater plurality of heritage practices, scale has emerged as an important concept in Heritage Studies, albeit relatively narrowly defined as hierarchical levels (household, local, national, etcetera). This paper argues for a definition of scale in heritage research that incorporates size (geographical scale), level (vertical scale) and relation (an understanding that scale is constituted through dynamic relationships in specific contexts). The paper utilises this definition of scale to analyse heritage designation first through consideration of changing World Heritage processes, and then through a case study of the world heritage designation of the Ningaloo Coast region in Western Australia. Three key findings are: both scale and heritage gain appeal because they are abstractions, and gain definition through the spatial politics of interrelationships within specific situations; the spatial politics of heritage designation comes into focus through attention to those configurations of size, level and relation that are invoked and enabled in heritage processes; and researchers choice to analyse or ignore particular scales and scalar politics are political decisions. Utilising scale as size, level and relation enables analyses that move beyond heritage to the spatial politics through which all heritage is constituted.