Paper short abstract:

The paper looks at World Heritage Sites as landscapes of ethnographic endeavor and investigates the dissonances between global and locale scale in heritage production processes.

Paper long abstract:

In time of late modernity, according to Harrison, the nation-state is slowly losing its control on and connection with heritage conservation and new forms of heritage authority, as non-governmental organizations, are on the rise (Harrison R., 2013).

I will explore how the "worldheritageization" phenomenon, the increasing inscription of landscapes, towns and other heritage objects in the UNESCO World Heritage List creates the potential of conflicts between global and local narratives, which can be defined as "heritage dissonances".

In landscape and heritage studies research, local or global scales are often considered as given, as inert containers of the research, or natural levels of a governance system, but heritage scales are never neutral: they are often formatting power behaviors between social actors (Lähdesmäki T., Zhu Y. and Thomas S., 2019).

Among actors of different scales there is always a conflict around the questions: Whose heritage? Which heritage values from the past should be conserved in the present and brought to the future?

In this research scales dissonances are revealed through the implementation of the technical standards prescribed by UNESCO Advisory Bodies such as ICOMOS.

The paper explores how ICOMOS experts in the World Heritage Landscape of the Palladian Villas in northern Italy use the global scale to foster cultural elitism, narrative of classes and social exclusion and how local actors create a "dissonance" by producing alternative heritage through materiality, representation and experience.