Construction du champ patrimonial à Bali à la croisée des représentations plurielles de l’île et de ses héritages

Since the 1990s, international heritage policies, and especially the nomination of several heritage sites for the UNESCO World Heritage List, have triggered controversies in Bali. These controversies reveal how the competition between distinct heritage systems contribute to the evolution and the redefinition of the heritage field in Bali, as shown by the development of social movements and institutional reforms in Indonesia. In this paper, I look at the evolution of the representations of Bali and its architectures since the XIXth century. I examine the ongoing debates surrounding the recognition of the island’s built, urban, and landscape heritage. I bring into light the island’s plurality of non-exclusive ideas about heritage. I give specific attention to the role of a group of « cultural brokers » who produce « hybrid heritages » that draw on several reference universes. I show that heritage programs take ground on the images and the authorized definitions of heritage which were constructed since colonial times. They underwent processes of contextualized cultural mixing which were influenced by the challenges posed by the construction of identities and tourism development. In this paper, I aim to move beyond the binary opposition between heritage approaches: e.g. top-down versus bottom-down, global vs. local, exogenous vs. endogenous, and Western vs. Asian. I examine how the heritage field was constructed through phenomena of transfer, enforcement, incorporation, and appropriation. Taken together, these phenomena contribute to the evolution and transmission of the ideas of heritage in Bali.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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