"Critical scholarship across archaeology, geography, anthropology, history, and conservation, has firmly established that UNESCO’s World Heritage designations are enmeshed with different forms of politics, ranging from geopolitics to identity, cultural, and market politics. Such scholarship has further critiqued the UNESCO model as homogenizing culture and the World Heritage model as a technocratic enterprise.

It is against the backdrop of such critiques that I ask what happens on-ground once a particular location is inscribed as World Heritage. Following designation, what is the nature of the ‘heritage regime’ established at that location? Here I explicate its everyday mechanisms by drawing on long-standing ethnographic engagements with diverse communities and settlements of Hampi World Heritage Site, Karnataka, India.

I approach the landscape and various social actors through the lens of a practitioner-academic with over two decades of empirical engagement with everyday heritage conservation-management. I observe that protected sites often become the interface, where the everyday and the exceptional intersect, resulting in the socio-spatial marginalization of resident communities. Such outcomes are completely contrary to the aims of a largely ethical, reflexive discipline of conservation."