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New Wave of Promoting National Heritage: UNESCOs “Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage” and its Implementation

The intention of the article is to delineate politics and practices of the UNESCOs program on intangible cultural heritage. Based on the “Convention for the safeguarding of the intangible cultural heritage” (2003), the main ideas of the program are cultural diversity, the authority of communities and groups in defining their heritage, the processual nature of heritage, and intercultural dialogue. However, the growing body of ethnographic research into their implementation has revealed that these ideas are in practice often turned upside down. Reasons have been usually recognized in national or nationalistic cultural politics, while rarely in UNESCOs program on the whole, namely in the paradox that universal measures (Convention as a normative instrument and accompanying recommendations and instructions) are meant to safeguard the relativity of the subject (local, sub-national communities and their heritage). Chosen Bolivian, Japanese and Croatian examples will illustrate some of the problems incorporated in UNESCOs program, especially the relationship between common good and intellectual property, tangible and intangible heritage, Western and non-Western values, doing and performing, tradition and heritage, non/changeability and non/permeability of boundaries between communities.

UNESCO, intangible cultural heritage, cultural diversity, practicing community, Croatia, Japan, Bolivia

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