A Flexible Blending: Cultural Heritage and the Concept of Cultural Diversity in UNESCO

In this paper, I follow the concept of cultural diversity within UNESCO and explore how and why it has filtered into heritage discourse, initiatives, and cultural conventions. The paper makes two main contributions. Firstly, I start out by presenting data on the historical use of the concept of cultural diversity within UNESCO since 1945, based on the organization’s comprehensive online database and archive. Using the organization’s digital archive in this way offers a novel approach to tracing the development of a key term in UNESCO’s discourse and tracking its evolving significance over time. Secondly, I focus on four important contexts in which the concept of cultural diversity has been influential in UNESCO: development, cultural heritage, diversity of cultural expressions, and biodiversity. I show how cultural diversity has served as a key conceptual resource for advocates of anthropologically informed approaches to heritage that were formalized in the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Heritage. I also follow how the concept of cultural diversity has been mobilized by UNESCO members in the process resulting in the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions in 2005. The scholarly literatures on both conventions are substantial. However, I connect these literatures in new ways by focusing on how the concept of cultural diversity functioned in both cases, and I break new ground by analyzing its use over a longer time frame—one that also links notions of cultural diversity and biodiversity. In the context of the special collection, the contribution of the article is to explore how the term “cultural diversity” has been used in what is arguably the most influential international organization in the field of cultural diplomacy during the last seventy-five years.