The intangible cultural heritage (ICH) concept has been operational in China for almost 20 years. One integral part of China’s ICH landscape is a range of exhibition spaces and museums that ...specialise in the display, performance, and transmission of ICH. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork at different exhibition sites, this paper provides insights into what these exhibition spaces look like, how they function, how ICH is exhibited within them, and what exhibitions mean to different heritage actors. The article shows how ICH exhibitions have themselves become a sociocultural phenomenon, bringing together a variety of actors who experiment with different forms of display and types of exhibitions in an ad hoc, spontaneous, and unregulated way. The paper also contributes to the broader discussion on ICH as a political intervention that transforms the cultural practices and expressions it normatively sets out to safeguard.
Culinary Tensions Demgenski, Philipp
Asian ethnology,
03/2020, Letnik:
79, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This article focuses on the so-far unsuccessful attempts to inscribe elements of Chinese cuisine on the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Food designated as ...heritage has sparked a heated debate among academics and heritage experts, while being embraced by state parties. In China, food-related ICH nomination initiatives have come mainly from private businesses, local governments, and the China Cuisine Association. Only recently have national-level ICH experts taken several initiatives to make Chinese culinary ICH fit the ideas of the Convention, thus making it a potential candidate for a submission to UNESCO. This article discusses different actors’ ideas about food and heritage, how they conceive of culinary ICH, and for what purposes they are pursuing it. The story of Chinese food-related ICH is one of commercialization and the mushrooming cultural industry, but it is also very much a story about different understandings of the concept of ICH and provides insights into how a global concept gets localized in China and is appropriated by different governmental and non-governmental actors, to then be realigned and adapted again to fit the criteria for international inscription.
Seeking a Future for the Past: Space, Power, and Heritage in a Chinese City examines the complexities and changing sociopolitical dynamics of urban renewal in contemporary China. Drawing on ten years ...of ethnographic fieldwork in the northeastern Chinese city of Qingdao, the book tells the story of the slow, fragmented, and contentious transformation of Dabaodao—an area in the city’s former colonial center—from a place of common homes occupied by the urban poor into a showcase of architectural heritage and site for tourism and consumption. The ethnography provides a nuanced account of the diverse experiences and views of a range of groups involved in shaping, and being shaped, by the urban renewal process—local residents, migrant workers, preservationists, planners, and government officials—foregrounding the voices and experiences of marginal groups, such as migrants in the city. Unpacking structural reasons for urban developmental impasses, it paints a nuanced local picture of urban governance and political practice in contemporary urban China. Seeking a Future for the Past also weighs the positives and negatives of heritage preservation and scrutinizes the meanings and effects of “preservation” on diverse social actors. By zeroing in on the seemingly contradictory yet coexisting processes of urban stagnation and urban destruction, the book reveals the multifaceted challenges that China faces in reforming its urbanization practices and, ultimately, in managing its urban future.
This paper investigates the bureaucratisation of the (utopian) ideal of community participation in Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) safeguarding and management. The analysis considers the whole ...‘policy life’ of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of ICH. Our ethnographic examples from UNESCO, Brazil, China and Greece illustrate how bureaucratic operations often disenchant the participatory ideal, alienating it from its original intention. At the same time, driven by their commitment to ‘good’ governance and informed by sentiments of frustration and disappointment with actual policy results, vocational bureaucrats at different administrative levels experiment with and conceive of new tools in order to produce evidence of participation. We demonstrate how this bureaucratic creativity has concrete consequences, which may differ from the intended utopia, but nevertheless bring to life particular interpretations of the participatory principle among the recipients for whom heritage policies were originally designed. Thus, we present a more nuanced picture of bureaucratisation in which officials’ emotions and engagement sustain their agency against structural constraints as well as the futility and fragility of administrative procedures.
Démontrer la participation: la place des bureaucrates vocationnels et de la créativité bureaucratique dans la mise en œuvre de la Convention de l’UNESCO pour la sauvegarde du patrimoine culturel immatériel
Cet article examine la bureaucratisation de l’idéal (utopique) de participation de la communauté dans la sauvegarde et la gestion du patrimoine culturel immatériel (PCI). L’analyse se penche sur l’ensemble de la « vie administrative » de la Convention de l’UNESCO pour la sauvegarde du PCI. Nos exemples ethnographiques – qui viennent de l’UNESCO, du Brésil, de la Chine et de la Grèce – montrent à quel point les opérations bureaucratiques désenchantent souvent l’idéal participatif, en le détournant de ses intentions premières. Parallèlement, motivés par leur engagement pour une « bonne » gouvernance et poussés par un sentiment de frustration et de déception devant les résultats réels de ce modèle, des bureaucrates vocationnels, à des niveaux administratifs divers, conçoivent et expérimentent de nouveaux outils dans le but de produire des preuves de cette participation. Nous démontrons que cette créativité bureaucratique a des conséquences concrètes, parfois éloignées du projet utopique de départ, mais qui donnent cependant lieu à des interprétations singulières du principe de participation parmi ceux pour qui les politiques patrimoniales étaient initialement conçues. Ainsi, nous dressons un tableau plus nuancé de la bureaucratisation, dans lequel l’engagement et les émotions des responsables alimentent leur action en dépit des contraintes structurelles, de la futilité et de la fragilité des procédures administratives.
This article focuses on the so-far unsuccessful attempts to inscribe elements of Chinese cuisine on the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Food designated as ...heritage has sparked a heated debate among academics and heritage experts, while being embraced by state parties. In China, food-related ICH nomination initiatives have come mainly from private businesses, local governments, and the China Cuisine Association. Only recently have national-level ICH experts taken several initiatives to make Chinese culinary ICH fit the ideas of the Convention, thus making it a potential candidate for a submission to UNESCO. This article discusses different actors ideas about food and heritage, how they conceive of culinary ICH, and for what purposes they are pursuing it. The story of Chinese food-related ICH is one of commercialization and the mushrooming cultural industry, but it is also very much a story about different understandings of the concept of ICH and provides insights into how a global concept gets localized in China and is appropriated by different governmental and non-governmental actors, to then be realigned and adapted again to fit the criteria for international inscription.
