Heritage   |   PT  /  ES

The Tikuna have no single word for “heritage.” For some months before her Pelazón (hair-pulling) ceremony, a young Tikuna girl lives in seclusion in a small room inside the house, visited only by her grandmothers and mother, who transmit the skills and traditions that will make her a Tikuna woman. Stories, rituals, dances, ceremonial masks, family knowledge, and the memory of sacred places are passed from elders to youth through performance and storytelling, preserved in a unique and isolated language. Together, these practices define what it is to be Tikuna.

By contrast, the European concept of heritage (hereditas, heritage, Erbe, patrimônio) and the Chinese 遗产 (yíchǎn) took more than a millennium to evolve from a narrow legal notion — property transmitted to legitimate heirs — into a broader idea encompassing goods shared by communities, nations, and eventually all humanity. Only later did the term expand beyond the material to include the intangible. In this sense, both Western and Eastern traditions have been catching up with the Tikuna.

From antiquity to the late eighteenth century, hereditas in Europe remained a strictly legal concept denoting private inheritance. A decisive shift came with the French Revolution, which asserted the primacy of the nation over dynasty or family. Intellectuals argued that properties seized from the Church and aristocracy such as castles, palaces, and churches, should not be destroyed but preserved for the nation as a collective legacy. As industrial exploitation threatened landscapes, the idea of heritage expanded further to include natural as well as built environments worthy of protection from private destruction.

In the age of nationalism, monuments and historic sites were cultivated as “places of memory,” invested with meanings by politicians, poets, and historians to forge collective identities rooted in imagined pasts. Heritage thus moved from the private, individual or familial to the public or collective sphere. This process is inherently political: decisions about what to preserve and how to interpret are often contested. The stakes were and remain high, since defining heritage shapes communal identity, constructs a shared past, and guides the future. Heritage disputes over the existence or the meaning of sites, objects, and traditions can become violent.

Given their symbolic power, heritage sites became deliberate targets in modern warfare. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, armies destroyed monuments, artworks, and cultural practices, while others perished as “collateral damage.” At the same time, modernization swept away historic towns, natural landscapes, and traditional crafts, disrupting long-standing cultural practices worldwide.

After the Second World War, UNESCO and related organizations including the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUUCN) sought to extend the concept of heritage beyond the nation to all humankind. Cultural and natural sites judged of “Outstanding Universal Value ” were designated as World Heritage Sites. From an initial twelve sites in 1978, the list had grown to 1,748 by 2025.

Since 2008, UNESCO has further broadened its scope to include Intangible Cultural Heritage — practices, expressions, and skills deemed essential to cultural diversity — and, more recently, documentary heritage through its “Memory of the World” program.

Yet UNESCO designations are no less political than national decisions about heritage. Disputes arise as between the meanings local communities assign sites and those of international organizations. Moreover, such designation offers neither guaranteed protection nor direct financial support. The best that UNESCO can do when a heritage site is damaged in conflict is to issue a strongly worded press release reminding combatants of their responsibilities under the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. Even so, the prestige of recognition, the promise of tourism, and the hope of influencing local policy encourage costly and competitive applications. Such recognition can also have unintended consequences. Rather than sustaining living traditions, it may freeze them into museum pieces: cities crowded with tourists rather than residents, artisans producing for markets rather than communities.

And yet, far from these globalized heritage sites, heritage continues to live in quieter forms: the watch passed down through generations of a family along with the stories of the women who owned it; the Friday candles lit out of inherited custom from distant Criptojudeus ancestors in otherwise Catholic families in former Spanish colonies; the Pelazón ceremony itself. These small acts of transmission — objects, gestures, words, identities — repeated across generations and multiplied countless times, constitute the deepest and most enduring forms of human heritage.

Patrick J. Geary