What follows is a case study of a single concept, world heritage. It looks at the construction of modernist heritage politics on a global scale, and at attempts to critique and countercolonize these efforts in communalist terms. It could have been a case study of any number of issue-areas. It could also have been more materialist and less mentalist (and given the contemporary significance of the capitalist mode of production, should arguably have been so). Because of the relative neglect of world heritage as a politico-cultural concept, however, and the clarity with which modernist/non-modernist concerns are manifest in such terms, it was this issue that was chosen to exemplify the way modernity works.