‘European’ and ‘Asian’ approaches to cultural landscapes management at Borobudur, Indonesia in the 1970s

Abstract

The early 1990s saw a move against European-dominated discourses of heritage and the concept of authenticity in the World Heritage system, with the development of the Nara Document. The Document, now in its twentieth year from inception, articulated a developing Asian approach to authenticity, recognising the ways and means to preserve cultural heritage with community participation and different understandings of heritage that existed outside Europe. Meanwhile, there was another significant development and split in ideas around cultural landscapes in the 1990s that has broadened wider interdisciplinary debates in heritage studies. Through the case study of the Borobudur Temple, which was the focus of large-scale interventions by UNESCO and the Japanese during the 1970s, this paper explores the dichotomy between European monument-centred heritage approaches against the cultural landscapes concept developed in Japan. Overall, this paper finds that at the time of the site’s nomination for inscription on the World Heritage List, the obligatory use of World Heritage criteria meant that the Indonesian authorities followed European ideas of heritage value. This resulted in continued post-colonial monument-centred heritage conservation and held back the shift of heritage management to community involvement and the practice of wider landscape protection.

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