Conceptualizing Heritage Responsibility in World Heritage Sites: Insights from Levinas’ Ethics of Responsibility

The concept of responsibility has always been closely tied to notions of powers and rights. However, current responsibility models such as ‘corporate social responsibility’ , ‘ responsible tourism’ , and ‘ destination social responsibility’ are limited in their explanations of stakeholders’ powers and rights in the heritage tourism context. The current conceptualization of heritage responsibility poses a number of challenges, such as complicated subjects, ambivalent direction, and vague logic. Moreover, engaging with problems such as the asymmetric relationship between responsibility and rights, and the vague relationship between subject and object of responsibility, has been hampered by a lack of sufficient philosophical grounding. The paper addresses this gap by reanalyzing responsibility in the heritage tourism context using Levinas’ ethics of responsibility. This study argues the following: a) Heritage responsibility is an ethical responsibility that agents undertake in the process of identifying, interpreting and representing heritage. This type of responsibility points not only to the subjectobject ( heritage) level, but also the intersubjective level, and consists of not only responsibilityfortheself, but also responsibilityfortheother. b) Heritage responsibility, from the perspective of Levinas’ ethics of responsibility, features passivity, infinity, asymmetry, and preoriginariness, which accounts for the unequal distribution of rights and responsibilities in heritage conservation. c) Given these features of heritage responsibility, the discursive power of stakeholders must be recognized in order to ensure that agents with authority assume their share of responsibility. This paper further discusses the relationship between heritage responsibility and selfidentity, cultural identity, and discursive power relations, and outlines issues for future research.