Beyond The Monument: Who Decides What History Is Worth Saving?

Walking into any major museum in the world, one witnesses the same set of things: grand objects, expert labels, and the quiet assumption that whatever is behind the glass is there because it deserves to be. Anyone rarely stops to question who made the choice of these objects and which objects were left behind in this choice. Leaving the question of whose history is being displayed and whose is being quietly left out.

Illustration by The Geostrata

This is the question that sits at the heart of Dr Laurajane Smith's landmark 2006 book, Uses of Heritage, in which she introduced the concept of the Authorised Heritage Discourse or more commonly known as AHD. Her argument, simply put, is that heritage is not a thing.

It is not a building, a ruin, or an artefact sitting in a glass case; rather, it is a political process and the people who control that process and control history itself.

EXPERTS TOOK OVER, AND NOBODY REALLY NOTICED  

Smith's central idea is based on the French philosopher Michel Foucault's notion that "those who own the language own the power”. The architects, archaeologists, conservation scientists and international institutions that control the language are the people of heritage. They are the ones who determine what is important, what is funded, what is legally safeguarded and what is simply allowed to go under the radar. 

This is the AHD, the dominant west-centric system of formal heritage systems, which regulates the majority of the world's formal heritage systems. According to Smith, it consistently favours four things: monumentality (the larger the better, and the older the better), materiality (materials and physical objects over practices of living), expert authority (trained professionals over the knowledge of communities) and nation-building (heritage that supports a national identity over heritage that challenges it).

The practical consequence of this is a system that is well equipped to protect a cathedral but less well equipped to protect a song, or the knowledge of the community that created it. It has developed strong tools for inscribing palaces and ancient ruins, but fewer tools for the intangible traditions that give those places their living meaning.

UNESCO AND NUMBERS TELL A STORY

The most explicit institutional manifestation of the AHD is the World Heritage List created in the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage of 1972, managed by UNESCO. 

The list was constructed based on the concepts of Western expert and the monumental physical heritage, which prevailed in the conservation thinking of the time.

The statistics are interesting. There are now 1,273 (as of 2026) properties inscribed on the World Heritage List. Italy, Germany, and France together account for 172 of them. The entire African continent, across 45+ states, accounts for 115. This gap takes into account, in part, the resource and infrastructure limitations of countries in their approach to the nomination process, which is lengthy and technically challenging. The World Heritage List has also evolved in terms of scope as well, over time, as for some countries it has become a method to promote ‘cultural diplomacy' and international visibility.

China currently has 61 World Heritage sites, which is 2nd in the world. In 2014, the Chang'an-Tianshan Silk Road corridor was jointly nominated by China, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan as a World Heritage Site, which was close to China's larger regional Silk Road narrative at the time. The United States, which has withdrawn from UNESCO, meanwhile has $619 million in arrears, which is being made up by other member states. These changes have led to a renewed debate on possible changes in the institutional influence of UNESCO in the next few years.

THE COMMUNITIES WHO WERE NEVER ASKED

One of the most important criticisms to come out of Smith's work is that of the link between formal heritage institutions and the community whose living culture they seek to protect. The listing of Uluru as a UNESCO World Heritage Area was interpreted by the Aboriginal community (Anangu) with mixed feelings in Australia. 

The Western conservation paradigm that prioritises the site as a physical entity of OUV (Outstanding Universal Value) was not easily able to incorporate the Anangu sense of Uluru as an ongoing relationship with land, people, and their knowledge. For decades, Aboriginal peoples have been fighting for the closure of recreational climbing on the site, and in 2019, they succeeded in closing this activity, which was broadly welcomed as an important step towards better and more community-led management.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, 1990, was passed in North America and mandated the repatriation of indigenous human remains and sacred objects to their communities of origin. The bill has recognized the gaps in the institutional frameworks that have long been established to manage the governance of heritage collections, in relation to the rights and interests of the communities that are most directly affected by them.

SYSTEM IS SHIFTING SLOWLY

The concerns raised by Smith and others in the field of critical heritage studies have gradually found their way into policy. An important milestone was the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage of 2003, which was an official recognition of the value of oral traditions, rituals, performing arts, community knowledge and other forms of heritage that are not physical, but rather living or intangible.

Heritage management strategies are increasingly taking a participatory orientation, with communities more directly engaged in documenting and managing their own cultural practices and sites, such as in conservation codes and professional standards. In the field, the notion that communities possess knowledge and authority which can add to and not supplant that of professionals is becoming more widely embraced. There has been uneven progress. There are still many contexts where funding and legal frameworks are biased towards tangible and monumental heritage. However, there have been some tangible changes in the direction of thinking in conservation over the past 20 years since Smith's original criticism.

HERITAGE HAS ALWAYS BEEN ABOUT MORE THAN THE PAST

Uses of Heritage was published by Laurajane Smith in 2006. Since then, her questions concerning who is authorised to say what is heritage, whose knowledge is valued, and whose past is deemed worth saving have become more relevant than ever. The challenges facing heritage institutions today are more varied than those that faced them in their construction; questions of representation, community authority and geopolitical influence all intertwine with the work of conservation. Whether or not they can handle this complexity will determine not only what is saved, but who will define the collective future and not just the past. 

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BY ASMITA SAHA

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