Building a ‘cultural city’: Heritage, identity, and the politics of reconstruction in Bhaktapur, Nepal

Nepal's devastating 2015 earthquakes prompted anxious attention to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO)-designated World Heritage sites in the Kathmandu Valley and the means and methods for rebuilding damaged monuments and residences. As a value-loaded concept, the debate over ‘heritage’ today lays bare tensions between the national government and local authorities over the use of foreign experts, building techniques and materials, and the appropriate aesthetics for heritage reconstruction. Drawing upon ethnographic data, archival material, and photo documentation from the city of Bhaktapur – one of the three major urban areas of the Kathmandu valley – we trace how local autonomous political power and heritage management unfolded interdependently over time. By considering contestations over the styles of private houses, public temples and former royal palaces, we show how heritage becomes the site of power struggles between a municipality and the national government, between the locally powerful Newar Indigenous community and the nationally dominant caste Hindu hill elite, between private homeowners and public officials. Our findings build on the values-based approach to heritage studies through a focus on heritage as the material manifestation of community values, but also the site where those values are continually contested.