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Monument of nature? An ethnography of the world heritage of Mt. Kenya
This dissertation examines the World Heritage status of Mt. Kenya, an alpine area in Central Kenya. The mountain joined the World Heritage List in 1997 and in 2013 the original designation expanded to cover a larger area. Both events were formulated exclusively in natural scientific language. This partly echoes the natural beauty of Mt. Kenya’s landscape, but it also reverts to a range of conditions that shaped the World Heritage nomination and modification processes, this work demonstrates. These conditions include the World Heritage Convention’s rigid separation of natural and cultural heritages, reflected in its bureaucratic apparatus; the ongoing competition between two government institutes over the management of Mt. Kenya, which stems from colonial forest and game laws; the particular composition of Kenya’s political arena in respectively the late 1990s and the early 2010s; and the precarious position of white inhabitants of post-colonial Kenya, which for instance translates in constant fears for losing land rights. In sum, this dissertation argues against studies that claim that World Heritage is a state tool that chiefly serves the dissemination of nationalist propaganda. Instead, it suggests unpacking World Heritage’s technical and non-political rhetoric, to begin understanding how and why individual World Heritage Sites come about.
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- All authors
- Akker, M.L. van den
- Supervisor
- Pels, P.J.
- Committee
- Persoon, G.A.; Meskell, L.; Legêne, S.
- Qualification
- Doctor (dr.)
- Awarding Institution
- Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology , Social and Behavioural Sciences , Leiden University
- Date
- 2016-05-25