One might better understand the significance of the heritage of humanity by first recognizing and studying local heritage. Also the heritage of humanity will be seen through each culture and individual differently. Does an actual heritage of humanity exist or is that attributable to each person’s knowledge and experience that is dependent on local culture and one’s unique vision?

Everything about humanity is inextricably woven in the local cultural heritage of a people. In this sense, humanity is viewed in specifics, related to the local cultures in various regions of the world. The rich cultural heritage of diverse people aids in generally understanding the heritage of humanity.

Although I would not undervalue local heritage nor would I make too much of it either. I some instances it certainly adds to our understanding of our species in other ways it merely detracts. In the end, this is a new era where critiquing and assessment is important. Holding on to the past is unnecessary.

The concept of UNESCO cultural heritage prefers objects of local culture.

this link is useful

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_heritage

regards

Thank you very much for the comments, the heritage of humanity begins in the local heritage of a people or culture

Hello María and everyone.

As a matter of fact, local heritage is the base for the world heritage because of the society factor. We must remember that heritage is a social recognition of the endless values granted to the material and immaterial cultural goods and therefore many types of the local heritage can be related to other sites in different countries. Maybe the critical point is the refference of "extraordinary" in the 1972 UNESCO Convention, where the term highlights unique monuments and sites, therefore the significance of a local heritage can't be percieved as great as a world heritage declaration. Nevertheless, the pride of a community within it's local heritage, gives more weight and interest to it's preservation because it's a crucial part of their own identity.

maria,

a great question for sure. As an archaeologist I study existing cultures to infer similar patterns manifested in the archaeological record, and because of this I am not limited to just one culture or time period, but many different cultures around the globe, and I suppose all of those cultures reflect parts of a culture of humanity--a summation of the human experience.

Each culture interprets the "reality" around it, and through that lens they can adapt and survive in those particular environments. The interesting part is how each culture interprets and adapt. Even now, we as human beings must adapt to the high technological culture we have created. and like the home fires of old we sit around our tele-screens and tell our tales of hope and survival to each other.

If the Heritage has a spiritual transcendent meaning then it is even more important than people. For the sake of churches standing, in the past, there has been seen a lot of martyr sacrifice. That is what history prooves. Churches in Kosovo were targeted mainly because of faith. They were the symbols of what holds the life of a nation. When the main symbols of that nation is destroyed, then that nation is going down. Kosovo, as Raska, was and still is the cradle of Serbian nation, territorially and spiritually. The heritage laying there is still in an uncertain safety.

So yes, there is a thin line between calling a bigger importance on people and their heritage, they are strongly inseparably connected..

As a deep humanist, I'd always choose people above everything else, they are the reason why God came into World to put Himself on the Cross.

Then I look of the recently looted antique sites in Syria, such as Palmyra. That is a heritage that belongs to whole humanity. So I personally am related to it, I personally feel offended by the destruction. The heritage is a personal thing, and it should be!

Local Cultural Heritage versus Heritage of the Humanity: Which one has the preeminence?

In this era of globalization which is not completely true because, the real globalization has started in the 15th century, at the threshold of the western modernity, it is more and more important to reflect on the content of the words local/global, ethnicity/humanity, etc. I use the opportunity of the question of this colleague to throw some ideas in the discussion.

Tentative definition of the two concepts

The local heritage is the one that belongs to a (small) community at the scale of a village or a city. This type of heritage could eventually be extended to the level of a region but is definitely below the national boundaries. Regarding the heritage of the humanity, it could be seen theoretically as a heritage that encompasses partially or more local heritages of every place where a trace of humanity is retrieved. The heritage of the humanity may be assimilated to the world heritage without being exactly the same thing. For example, one can refer to is the archaeological finding of the Leakey family in Oldowai as the heritage of the humanity because these materials are important in the physical development of the mankind.

The scope of extension of the two concepts

Generally speaking, we could talk about a local heritage when it addresses a community. For instance, the concept of local heritage stands for the Goun population in Porto-Novo (Republic of Benin) or for the Breton, the Corsican in France. The same thing goes for the Yankee in the United States of America, etc. But it is not applicable for the Yoruba for instance without a regionalization, a kind of connection to a local environment. It is so because the Yoruba people, along the time and due to the transatlantic migrations, have spread beyond the originally indigenous boundaries, and have even indigenized in places like Brazil, Cuba, etc., all these areas being far from the African continent.

The preeminence of the one on the other

All these been said, could one admit that the local heritage has preeminence on the heritage of the humanity or the other way around? Let say it straight forward, the local heritage does not or cannot replace the heritage of the humanity. The people in the locality stand by or on their own. They have their intrinsic identity that helps differentiate them from other identities. But the heritage of the humanity is a political game, a consensus that elevates an element of the heritages of the mankind to the pedestal of heritage of the humanity. This political consensus is reached through the design of a convention that is proposed to the agreement of the international community or the state-parties of the UNESCO. The different convention of 1954, 1972 and 2003 are those falling in the perimeter of heritage of the humanity.

I agree with Peter's view, and not just because we are both archaeologists & ethnographers. The "heritage of humanity" would be the sum of many distinctly unique local kinds of cultural practices and heritage. As anthropologists, we look for regularities across all human behaviors, past & present, to better understand how humans have evolved. However, the use of more scientific methods in ethnography (i.e., behavioral ecology) and archaeology are relatively recent. We are far from developing sweeping theoretical knowledge about human behavior in general or many important aspects of how smaller-scale adaptations in the great diversity of environments where humans live have developed (cultural heritage). The capacity for behavioral plasticity appears to be a hallmark of human behavior, we adapt to new areas through variation in cultural mechanisms, not biological speciation. Most of us spend our careers working to improve our understanding of a small set of human activities we can study in the present or through archaeological remains, and developing the next questions we need for research that will situate that knowledge productively for our improved sophistication in addressing related or novel questions. For many practical modern global solutions, local cultural heritage is the source of significant new knowledge (for example, traditional medicines used by subsistence peoples around the world help identify compounds that can be synthesized and added to the industrialized worlds collective medical knowledge). From a researchers' perspective, we work concretely with the kinds of data we can generate about local cultural practices to better understand the diversity of human cultural variation, and our heritage as humans with a much more vast experience of the natural world than the short time period since the industrial revolution. The "heritage of humanity" would be an anthropological goal of understanding better the breadth and variation in our cultural practices, knowledge, and how these capacities have evolved.