ABSTRACT
The Bible meets the main criteria that international heritage organizations (chief among them, UNESCO) use to distinguish cultural heritage properties from other cultural forms and creative expressions. To the American biblical fundamentalists who see the United States as a divinely directed nation the Bible unquestionably embodies "knowledge, know-how, skills, practices and representations" that are "expressed through language, oral traditions, feelings of attachment towards a place, memories, spirituality and worldview". The body of what is identified as "traditional knowledge" at any given moment in history is something of a snapshot of cultural process in action – never pure, never completely original, usually contested, and always to a significant degree hybrid. The fundamentalist calls for a return to the "traditional knowledge" of the Bible offer clear evidence of the danger of privileging a certain orthodoxy that is constituted in the present yet represented as an eternal, unchanging element of communal identity.
