World heritage and inter/national cultural prestige

World heritage has become UNESCO’s flagship programme, and it is a site of active state engagement. At the crux of that engagement is the prestigious World Heritage List. This engagement is regularly analysed as pursuits of national prestige. In this article, I advance a Bourdieusian analysis of world heritage as a field that generates international cultural prestige. I identify humanity as the field’s doxa that allows for a vertical separation and the generation of more-than-national cultural value. I show how states’ desire for this prestige jeopardised the field’s autonomy at a critical juncture in 2010 and analyse the field’s aftermath as involving fraught attempts by states to discursively reconstruct the field’s vertical and functional separations in the quest for international cultural prestige. This reconstruction involves nothing less than reinterpreting humanity as the community-of-states, pointing at once to humanity’s indispensability for more-than-national value and undermining its ability to generate that value.