The Authenticity of Heritage: Global Norm-Making at the Crossroads of Cultures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyzes the global debate on the authenticity of cultural heritage as a lens through which to view the process of elaborating and reshaping global cultural norms. Drawing on interviews and mostly untapped archival records across several countries, it reveals that the groundbreaking Nara Document on Authenticity resulted from a surprising coalition of actors from diverse locations in the Northern Hemisphere. At Nara, Japan, in November 1994, Canadians, Japanese, and Norwegians came together at a Conference on Authenticity in Relation to the World Heritage Convention to challenge the prevailing Eurocentric definition of authenticity based on distinct yet partially overlapping interests. While adding a new focus on the arts and culture to the literature on twentieth-century international institutions as loci of transnational experiences, this article also offers a methodological illustration of how historical analysis can combine macro- and micro-perspectives, retaining primary materials as sources of evidence. It shows that the focus on entrepreneurial actors across geographical scales can lead to the discovery of archival troves highlighting seemingly unexpected connections such as those between Canada, Japan, and Norway. By illuminating these historical dynamics, this article further suggests that global norms not only bear the imprint of geographically and temporally anchored values but also result from alliances that straddle the traditional West/non-West or North/South divide. This research thus points to the importance of tracking global cultural connections outside a center-periphery framework and, more broadly, any preconceived geographical framework.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.044 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.119 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.029 | 0.028 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".