UNESCO, cultural heritage, and outstanding universal value: value-based analyses of the World Heritage and Intangible Cultural Heritage Conventions. Book review

This book examines the UNESCO heritage apparatus with a focus on the notion of outstanding universal value (OUV) in World Heritage (WH). The analysis is grounded in two theoretical concepts: ‘reiterative universalism’ and ‘contact zone’. The author elaborates the former through an interrogation of the tension between the multiplicity of relativist approaches to heritage and the universalist belief in the intrinsic nature of OUV, which is influenced by the European conservation line and involves the mediation of experts regarded as the only ‘legitimate’ and credible agents for its identification. The concept of ‘reiterative universalism’ allows the author to conciliate these two perspectives by emphasising the different culturally conditioned interpretations of UNESCO’s universalist framework, which results in creative translations of international standards. These translations are produced in ‘contact zones’ such as nomination dossiers, which are regarded by the author as the ‘ambivalent space maintaining, but also transgressing, the dominant European concept of heritage’