Intangible Heritage and Participation: Encounters with Safeguarding Practices

UNESCO's Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) mandates participation by communities. Nevertheless, community agency is limited because activities associated with the Convention are driven and mediated by cultural specialists and governments. Intangible Heritage and Participation: Encounters with Safeguarding Practices, by Marilena Alivizatou, examines initiatives designed to share authority and enable communities to represent their ICH on their own terms. In-depth case studies analyze how agency is—and isn't—enabled. Conceptual and methodological approaches to participation are also examined.Alivizatou views safeguarding as fundamentally museological, entailing preservation of knowledge and practices, intergenerational transmission, and research and documentation. The participatory safeguarding venues considered occur in “heritage places”: museums, schools, and research institutions. The types of projects examined reach well beyond those associated with the 2003 Convention.This volume provides an extensive overview of participatory concepts and methodologies in its initial chapters. It recognizes Georges-Henri Rivière's pioneering research on French folk culture as well as its limitations. He used community members as information sources and developed the concept of ecomuseums. However, his work is seen to lack reciprocity and active community involvement. The late twentieth-century participatory turn is viewed as marking a paradigm shift. Influences on new approaches to participation discussed in the book include postcolonial and post-structural critiques of politics, scholarship, and museums; deconstructionism; Althusser and Foucault; World Archaeology's incorporation of communities and Indigenous peoples for historical interpretation; anthropology's reflexive turn; Paolo Freire's critical pedagogy; and museum collaborations with community researchers. While the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage's role in conceptualizing ICH is recognized, there is nary a mention of public folklore, which engaged in participatory safeguarding long before the ICH Convention. Like many other critical heritage scholars, Alivizatou overlooks public folklore, claiming community participation was “one of the most important innovations of the 2003 Convention” (p. 14).Beginning in the 1970s, international development specialists utilized local knowledge rather than relying entirely on outside expertise. This participatory approach, Alivizatou indicates, has been critiqued as neoliberal co-optation supporting the agendas of outsider development experts. Alternatively, Alivizatou contends, local people should be enabled to attain real agency within power structures.A detailed discussion of Participatory Action Research (PAR) is illuminating for folklorists unaware of this major approach to research-based community engagement. Alivizatou limns multiple formative influences on PAR, including Kurt Lewin's action research testing theory through practical action; Freire's views on community members research as a vehicle for social change; Sherry Arnstein's continuum of local involvement, which ranges from nonparticipative manipulation to citizen control; Orlando Fals-Borda's use of oral traditions and other expressive culture for PAR; and John Gaventa's views on reclaiming knowledge from elites.Participatory research projects on migration in two museums deeply engaged community members in well-structured consultative processes. They expanded the purview of these museums, which faced new urban demographics. However, the projects were ultimately seen as lacking fit with museum priorities, with substantial power imbalances. For the Museum of Rotterdam's Authentic Rotterdam Heritage project, migrants participated in a Heritage Council recommending collecting criteria and monthly “coffee mornings” to discuss new areas of museum focus. The objects collected included a migrant worker's van that transported goods to and from Bulgaria. Over time, the museum prioritized other social issues. While community engagement increased, the new “active collections” were considered hard to exhibit and not a good fit with the museum's emphasis on the heritage of the past.Community researchers addressed contemporary diversity in Antwerp as volunteer Trackers in the MAS Museum (Museum aan de Stroom; “Museum by the Stream”). Letters, family photos, poems, work permits, narratives, and travel documents that they collected were exhibited. This project expanded the museum's permanent collection, fostered inclusion, and paved the way for future collaborations. However, museum staff members ultimately found this project lacking in contextualization, relevance to the overarching museum narrative, and appeal to broad audiences.Environmental participatory research projects studied how local and Indigenous knowledges shape alternatives to conservation practices that limit human impact and neglect community values. These studies demonstrate how local knowledge complements and provides alternatives to science. After New Zealand abolished the Urewera National Park, it turned over its lands to Te Urewera, an entity with majority Tūhoe Maori governance. Tūhoe researchers joined with an environmental research organization to document land values through interviews, field surveys, transect walks, and workshops. The project resulted in a forest health monitoring system with indicators developed from its research.In the Greek Pindos Range, an environmental scholar originally from the region studied how the forest is locally valued and safeguarded. Through interviews, community walks, and cognitive maps, she found supernatural beliefs about forests shaping local use. These research results shaped activism by project team members, who opposed the construction of a gas pipeline in protected areas. A resource for schools created as a result of this project covers biodiversity and how the forest figures in local history and culture.Nominations for UNESCO's Representative List of ICH, like all its lists, are made by States Parties to the Convention. Rather than reflecting the totality of ICH, these lists and the Convention in general embody “celebratory discourse” (p. 69) by neglecting difficult heritage. A chapter on memory, oral history, and testimony provides compelling examples of difficult heritage projects. El Lugar de la Memoria in Peru focuses on remembrances, dialogue, and reconciliation relating to the 1980–2000 conflict that made community members victims of terrorists and the state. This museum brings together families of victims, researchers, journalists, artists, police, and army members to share narratives and dialogue to achieve heritage healing. They participated in museum planning through public consultation meetings. Representative testimonies were screened in video installations in an exhibition that also included chants and songs from demonstrations and embroidered textiles.The Museum of London's Refugee Community Histories Project explored the difficult heritage of forced migration through narratives researched by migrants it trained in fieldwork. The project dealt with flight from homelands, the journey, memories of home, and new lives in the UK. The project was intended to create empathy and counter stereotypes. It resulted in a traveling exhibition, CD-ROM, film, and community-based public programs. While migrant voices were foregrounded, the curators framed the overall project and chose what was presented. Power asymmetries persisted, as with other projects discussed in this volume.Memories of older adults with dementia resurfaced in a replica of a 1950s apartment at The House of Memory in the Danish Den Gamle open-air museum. Here, heritage healing is effectuated through music, photographs, objects, and conversations with museum staff, evoking memories. This innovative program is therapeutic and provided opportunities for sharing personal narratives.Case studies focusing on intergenerational transmission consider the “entanglements of transmission in broader social webs” (p. 20). This chapter begins with theories relating to transmission dealing with social learning, cultural evolution, and traditional ecological knowledge. It identifies dynamics of stability and change and aversion to loss as key issues. The scholarship discussed here is highly relevant to folkloristics. Unfortunately, there is no mention of conceptual and empirical studies in folklore or ethnomusicology about topics long studied in these disciplines, including variation, continuity and change, circulation, diffusion, and creativity and innovation within traditions. And, like in the UNESCO Convention, transmission is viewed inter- but not intra-generationally.Three case studies of transmission deal with traditions recognized by UNESCO or national government designations. The Japanese government proscribes changes in nationally recognized ICH genres, although innovations are beginning to be accepted. In Greece, the Art School of Tinos transmits marble crafts. Students learn traditional techniques and “fine art,” creating both contemporary and traditional work. The Storytelling Network in Sweden introduces storytelling to schools and youth groups, producing programs for people with mental disabilities and workshops for refugees to share folk tales.Keen insights about ethical issues and disjunctions with ICH ideals permeate this volume. It addresses both the benefits and shortcomings of ICH activities. Alivizatou applauds safeguarding that advances and incorporates social justice, local knowledge, community well-being, sustainable development, and mutual understanding. She calls for fair compensation, enabling innovation by tradition bearers and broad participation beyond local elites. She underscores the importance of informed consent, including the right to refuse participation. While the projects examined in the volume enable local knowledge and interpretation, the cultural specialists and institutions who frame, initiate, and create final products retain overarching authority.The 2003 ICH Convention has had a massive global impact on documenting and sustaining traditions, historically a domain of folklore studies, and it has inspired critical scholarship of great significance to folklorists. This volume is an important contribution to critical heritage studies, addressing core issues of community participation, ethics, innovation, and transmission with diverse case studies. While it is expansive in the types of projects considered, the museological framework does not allow for non-museological traditional performing arts and safeguarding activities lacking research and interpretation. The institutional focus misses community-based safeguarding such as locally generated apprenticeships and support structures like Japan's koankai, which is composed of community members supporting a traditional arts group. Like most critical heritage studies, reference to American public folklore scholarship and practice is absent. Nevertheless, there is much that folklorists can gain from this volume that addresses core topics of theory and practice, emphasizing equitable and enabling relationships with our community collaborators.