ABSTRACT
There are many understandings of the term modernism and even differing time frames, whether starting in the later nineteenth century or being more of a twentieth-century phenomenon. This broad-ranging coverage proves quite helpful for the following discussion of Mapungubwe National Park in South Africa and its entanglement with national patrimony, state agendas, mining and private enterprise, international borders and a global heritage agency. What interests me most are the limitations that inhere in the modernist project of nation-states and organizations such as UNESCO that traditionally rely on sovereign states, specifically in the realm of heritage. Yet this UN model of the globe is also being gradually eroded by the presence and visibility of other actors, whether NGOs or indigenous representatives. The fact that ‘modernism’ and its institutions continue to struggle for meaning is exactly why it continues to captivate us. This struggle for classical styles of sense-making is both unacceptable and inescapable, and traditional matrices of meaning, although they have been wholly deconstructed, nevertheless continue to exert an implacable force (Eagleton 1985: 70). Most of us working within archaeology and heritage are similarly constrained by modernist structures but here too one of the main challenges to those ingrained worldviews comes from indigenous communities and their heritage practices. In the case of Mapungubwe, UNESCO’s own categorization of the Cultural Landscape designation may be another internal attempt to challenge the fixity and boundedness of some old classifications, such as nature and culture, empty ‘wilderness’ versus lived and experiential places.
