A critique of unfeeling heritage

Abstract

Those of us who have pushed for recognition of ‘the intangible’ in heritage work are also those who tend to stress the ‘cultural’ in cultural heritage. We try to resist the tendency of heritage discourse to reduce culture to things, we try to counter its privileging of physical fabric over social life (for example, Byrne 1995, Byrne in press). The UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003) seems to us to be a mixed blessing. While it has the potential to bring more focus to the social dimension of heritage it seems also to want to regard social practices, skills and traditions as the equivalent of heritage objects, places or landscapes. The Convention (Article 2.1) defines intangible heritage as the ‘practices, representations, expressions, knowledge and skills’ (e.g., musical instruments and artworks) present in a culture, along with ‘instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith’ (for example, sites of ritual, workshops for art production). The Convention’s call for the documentation of intangible heritage is likely to face challenges from those Indigenous groups who do not want their intellectual property documented on the grounds that, once documented, its ownership too easily passes out of their hands. In any case, the Convention’s call for signatory states to prepare inventories of the intangible heritage present in their territories prefigures a task of ‘staggering’ proportions (Brown 2003), one that would surely be impossible to ever achieve in any comprehensive manner. In fact, though, the Convention’s intent appears not to be comprehensive so much as selective and hierarchical. The programme for Proclaiming Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Heritage instituted by UNESCO in 1998 implies that, like the World Heritage List, its concern is with the exceptional. Also, the absence of a review process for items of intangible heritage on the World Heritage List implies that intangible values are fixed and immutable rather than fluid and socially determined (Beazley 2006: 5). All of this is suggestive of the reification or thingification of culture (Taussig 1992: 84).

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