Intangible Cultural Heritage: The Midas Touch?
| Responsable du projet |
Ellen Hertz
Daniel Fabre Marc Olivier Gonseth Philippe Geslin Andres Kristol Walter Leimgruber Aurélie Reusser Elzingre |
| Collaborateur |
Andrea Jacot Descombes
Bernard Knodel Julie Perrin Yann Laville Hervé Munz Laurence Joyce Bodenmann Grégoire Mayor Miriam Cohn Florence Graezer Bideau Lara Duc Leila Baracchini Julie Rothenbühler Fabrice Gerber Federica Diémoz Silke Andris |
| Résumé |
The concept of intangible cultural heritage (hereinafter
"ICH") has been in circulation since the 1970s and has
spawned a number of measures, culminating in the 2003 UNESCO
Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. It
is the fruit of the realization that previous measures to protect
heritage have unduly favored rich, industrialized countries, with
their monumental constructions, over countries in the
"South" in which cultural products often take more
intangible forms: rituals, musique, belief-systems, etc, that
deserve international protection. Switzerland ratified this
Convention on July 18th, 2008. Under its terms, the government is
obliged to create an inventory of Swiss ICH. Given the relative
novelty of the ICH paradigm, its broad political mission and the
latitude granted to signatory states, one would think that the
application of the UNESCO Convention in the Swiss context would be
open to widely diverse interpretations. In fact, a certain number
of commonsense understandings of ICH, promoted by associations for
folk traditions, are largely determining the ways in which
Switzerland positions itself in relation to its treaty obligations.
The broadest aim of this multidisciplinary research project is to
keep reflections on ICH open at this initial stage by critically
examining what it might mean, whom it might benefit and what might
be worth inventorying and preserving under its auspices. The
project explores these questions through a series of targeted
empirical case studies. We ask: How we can meaningfully distinguish
material from immaterial cultural expression? How can we reconcile
the use of media (writing, recording, photography and film)
necessary for the constitution and preservation of ICH with the
charged norms of orality, immediacy and authenticity underlying the
ICH paradigm? Are items of ICH distributed in space and time
according to the community-based UNESCO model, and if not, what are
the relevant units of analysis? What is the relation of ICH to the
various forms of culture, including elite culture, already
supported by other institutions? Which groups does ICH favor, whose
cultural expressions are included and whose are excluded? Finally,
how does the bureaucratization of cultural preservation alter its
object, creating new understandings of culture and new resources
for which social actors will be inclined to compete? The project
brings together research teams from the Universities of Basel,
Lausanne and Neuchâtel, the Museum of Ethnography
(Neuchâtel), the CNRS (Laboratoire d'anthropologie et
d'histoire de l'institution de la culture, Paris) and the Haute
Ecole-Arc (Institut horlogerie et création). |
| Mots-clés |
heritage, culture, UNESCO, folklore, museums, story-telling, theater, hip hop, folk medecine, know-how, multimedia |
| Type de projet | Recherche fondamentale |
| Domaine de recherche | Ethnologie |
| Source de financement | FNS - Encouragement de projets (Div. I-III) |
| Etat | Terminé |
| Début de projet | 1-10-2009 |
| Fin du projet | 30-9-2012 |
| Budget alloué | 1'638'409.00 |
| Autre information |
http://p3.snf.ch/projects-127570# |
| Contact | Ellen Hertz |