ABSTRACT
The title of this paper is inspired by Appadurai’s (1986) work, The Social Life of Things, in which he suggests that commodities, like persons, can have social lives, and that economic things circulate under different “regimes of value” in space and time. This also holds true of World Heritage sites. I apply these ideas to show how Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle, two United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) World Heritage sites in Ghana, have social lives of their own, as their significance to different human actors has changed over time and their purpose means different things to different people. In the discussion that follows, we might think about how dynamics of cultural desire, economic demand, and political power dominate the construction of heritage tourism sites, thereby overriding their other potential uses.
