ABSTRACT
Increasingly closer to the universalistic rhetoric’s of Human Rights—and thus, trapped in the same ambivalences—UNESCO promotes local and regional cultures while appealing to feelings and emotions allegedly universal in its search for global ethics. The “international community” is more and more an imagined community of emotions which is displayed through its diverse, although universal, heritage. It is thus only natural that at this stage of globalization there is frequent recourse to UNESCO’s powerful instruments to ensure international sanction of political statements and rhetorics of economic development, and this is particularly true of countries with few resources of any other kind. This is a fact, whether we are dealing with countries outside the Western world (Africa, Asia or South America), or countries on the periphery or semi-periphery, such as Portugal, or else regions within these with even less economic resources and a far more muted political voice. A multi-sited (Marcus 1995) and plural ethnography of patrimonialization and touristification processes in places in North and Western Africa with ancient historical interchanges with Portugal within a contemporary and global context is particularly interesting because it throws a light on political relations that emerge between peripheral states and some south-to-south networks, thereby decentralizing a debate that remains far too often shaped by a vertical “UNESCO/ classified sites” axis of analysis.
