The multivocality of Rjukanfossen: What is to be sustained in World Heritage?

Water is life, water is reciprocity, we are all water, but do we know how to live well with water? 

Water appear many places in the blog and in my research over the past twenty years. Of course, I was engaging with social and cultural meanings of water in Rjukan and Tinn municipality, a post-industrial region in the interior south of Norway. My latest publication is a chapter I have written to raise awareness of the multivocality of falling water - the waters of Rjukan Water Falls in Norway. The chapter was written for an edited book, Multivocality in World Heritage: Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage Site, published by Routledge, 2025, and edited by me and my very good colleagues Steffen Johannessen, Guro Nordby and Benjamin Richards. 

I would like to share some from the chapter introduction (and please buy the book, or at least read the book which will be out in Open Access as well):

When visiting the official UNESCO website for Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage Site, what catches our awareness is the image of Vemork Power Station in the centre of the image. The power station opened in 1911 and is now the site for the Norwegian Industrial Worker’s Museum and the World Heritage Centre. Looking behind the museum building, we see remains from hydroelectric power production, pipes and intake structures that control the flow of water led through tunnels in the mountainside from the water magazine higher up. Imagine zooming in on the building from the air, seeing the landscape from above and with some more distance. Then, we become aware of something different: The most striking feature from the bird’s eye perspective is an all-embracing presence of natural elements. The cultural elements are less visible as we see a totality, a naturalcultural landscape with a canyon, the Rjukan waterfalls (Rjukanfossen), and other landforms which formed over a long time from the end of the last Ice Age. There is no falling water to see in the photo, because the river water is let through a headrace tunnel down to the power station.  

Dam-building and hydroelectric power production are iconic landmarks of industrial societies. Rjukan and Notodden were completely new towns from the early twentieth century and built right here, because of the huge amounts of water falling from high ground almost to sea level over a very short stretch. The gravitational force of falling and flowing water was piped, dammed and channelled through turbines that were connected to electricity generators. The dominant meaning and value of falling water for the industrialists was weight and fluidity, its capacity for hydroelectric power production. Even though we find accounts where industrialists understand that falling water is a renewable resource that can be exploited again and again, the key issue in the industrial project is the way the more-than-human and natural elements in the world are viewed as objects for human and societal purposes so that production and consumption can be maximised (Morrison, 1995).

In this chapter, I discuss how the falling waters at Rjukanfossen are backgrounded while at the same time existing as the necessary premise for the World Heritage site. The protected objects focus on man-made remains from the growth period of industrialisation in the early decades of the twentieth century. Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage Site is protected and characterised as a ‘cultural’ and not as a ‘mixed’ (combined cultural and natural) World Heritage property, which leads to a backgrounding of nature (see Johannessen et al., 2023, Taugbøl et al., 2014). Such backgrounding of nature is a typical feature of modern, industrialised societies (Plumwood, 2003).

We know that there is a profound discursive human-centredness in the way heritage values here are promoted and framed (Birkeland, 2008, 2014, 2015, 2018). And human-centredness is often constructed as a heroic project of overcoming natural forces. The mission report requested by Heritage Norway prior to the formal application process made such heroisation explicit in the title of the report: ‘Taming the Waterfalls’ (Föhl & Höhmann, 2010). Some parts of the natural landscape are, however, explicitly present and described in the documents, but the overall impression is the backgrounding of the more-than-human, all that is not man-made. The way Rjukanfossen and its water enters the World Heritage site is via its role as an invisible, fluid premise. The chapter aims at a discursive untaming. And a means to do so is by developing a fluid water-mindset that can help us replace human-centredness (anthropocentrism) with a sense of connectivity and adaptability. This discursive untaming shall serve to protect the dynamic life process in the web of life both natural and cultural. 

To raise awareness, I ask us to look deeper into the purpose of World Heritage. What is it that should be sustained in World Heritage?

To access the book at Routledge, click here.