Rethinking UNESCO World Heritage conservation-management: Negotiations with everyday heritage governance at Hampi, India

My study is a heritage ethnography that problematises the everyday consequences of heritage and its conservation as material practices at Hampi World Heritage Site (WHS). I commenced academic research from the vantage of community-engaged practice and sought to understand if ‘dissonance’ was inevitable when trajectories of ‘official heritage’ intersected with peoples’ lives. I proposed to do so by observing the nature of interactions between different actors (experts, enthusiasts, officials, resident communities) at Hampi WHS over routine site conservation-management. Fieldwork (over 16 months) helped me change lenses and move from a position of wondering why people seem apathetic to heritage to understanding what the ‘everyday violence’ of heritage as a form of governance does to people.
Contrary to expert opinion that Hampi’s official heritage is in dire need of ‘good governance’ I argue that the very entity of official heritage becomes a tool of everyday governance, which affects both the physical location as heritage ‘place’ and its residents as heritage subjects. I then foreground both the nature of and negotiations with the everyday ‘heritage regime’ instituted on site, subsequent to its designation as UNESCO WHS, along with its mechanisms of governance, by addressing the questions: What does the everyday form of the regime look like? Who does the governing? Who is being governed and how? What are its consequences and finally, what is the role of practice in such governance.
I argue that the regime is a bureaucracy of care (not of apathy as popularly supposed) that spatially governs place Hampi through the mechanism of nationalism, and its resident communities (social governance) through the mechanism of developmental-ism. I further argue that it is care that proves to be alienating for resident communities, resulting in different forms of displacement. I simultaneously foreground the (unintended) role of customary conservation mechanisms in enabling the regime, whose consequences are contrary to the aims of a largely ethical, reflexive practice, namely, democratising processes of site conservation-management. By presenting a nuanced and grounded understanding of the dynamics of heritage practice and its consequences, through a heritage ‘agnostic approach’, l aim to push the boundaries of critical conservation studies as an area of interdisciplinary studies.