engleski

Respecting Boundaries, Crossing Boundaries: The Implementation of Intangible Cultural Heritage in South-Eastern Europe

In this paper I analyze discourses and practices of interventions within UNESCO’s program for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage. The program stresses respect for diverse communities and groups, and their authority in defining their heritage ; it appreciates processes in a community instead of its reified products, and celebrates cultural diversity and intercultural dialogue. I examine these notions by looking into the implementation of UNESCO’s program in South-Eastern Europe, in Croatia and Macedonia in particular. Ethnomusicologists who have dealt with the subject (e.g. Ahmedaja on Albania, Silverman on Macedonia, Tsitsishvilli on Georgia, and the author on Croatia) have identified suppression and exclusion of certain groups, minorites in particular, or drawings of false boundaries between communities in question. The causes have been recognized mostly in local nationalisms rather than in the program’s profile on the whole. My argument broadens such an explanation by further identifying that politics of intervention, be it in the name of the most humanistic ideals, such as the case with UNESCO’s example, cannot solve tensions between affirmation and antidiscrimination, human and cultural rights, cultural diversity and intercultural dialogue, intellectual property and common good, speech in the name of pluralizing and work in essentializing. Similar tensions, already from the issue of identifying the tradition and community onwards, are considerably present in analyses of ethnographic disciplines, ethnomusicology among them, although they have at their disposal a much more nuanced analytical and interpretative tools. Therefore, it is not that UNESCO could or should respond differently to the challenges of tradition, community, heritage, boundaries, diversity, and other key notions, respect the self- identification of communities and processual nature of their traditions. Rather, it seems that the main – humanistic yet realistic – effect of the UNESCO’s program is in supporting the tourist expediency of national heritage production in the context of managed multiculturalism of difference. This is a trajectory of respecting the acknowledged boundaries between communities and cultures, but also crossing them – in terms of imbuing the local with a universal value and message, that is, producing the local appropriate for global understanding.

intangible cultural heritage; UNESCO; Souteastern Europe; multiculturalism; community

isti je referat 2008. predstavljen na International Conference Marking the 60th Anniversary of the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research – Challenging Integration: Culture Research and the European Context ( (crosbi br. 380213)