UNESCO frictions: Heritage-making across global governance – UNESCO FRICTIONS

Ethnographically exploring heritage policies across the entire chain of UNESCO-driven global governance challenges established anthropological approaches to fieldwork design and practices and entails experimenting with ad hoc methodology.
Maintaining a strong ethnographic approach to understanding complex world governance (i.e. empirically grounded first-hand observations of social interactions) prevents us from relying on macro-narratives of “global pictures”. This entails the identification and access to especially significant situations where we can investigate the concrete interactions of particular actors, devices, and rules. The UNESCO frictions researchers will thus focus on the contact zones where the translation from one heritage regime to another takes place (“capacity-building” projects or projects for the elaboration of nominations for UNESCO’s international Lists of ICH). As anthropologists, they are able to negotiate access to those situations because their area of expertise overlaps with the domain of the ICH Convention. Belonging to the “epistemic community” engaged in the implementation of the convention, which is at the same time the object of their investigation, is a particularly challenging condition as it raises the question of the representation of a culture from a position of intimacy. This experience allows them to tackle broader intellectual, ethical and political issues concerning the role of the anthropologist in the world we live in and the dilemmas of collaborating with policy apparatuses. UNESCO FRICTIONS will thus go beyond the heritage field and address and reflect upon the ethical and methodological challenges concerning the discipline at large.

The first workshop organised within the project has brought together 13 scholars to explore “collaborative dilemmas” thus developing a key methodological debate for UNESCO FRICTIONS. One virtual roundtable on allegralaboratory.net follows up to this workshop.

A panel entitled “At the UNESCO feast: Foodways across global heritage governance” was organised within the conference of the Association for Critical Heritage Studies (Montréal, 2016) and triggered an interdisciplinary conversation between legal scholars, anthropologists and historians to be developed in a special issue of the International Journal of Cultural Property.

Invited conferences in France, Germany, Portugal and Switzerland have provided valuable opportunities to present and discuss the project from theoretical and methodological points of view.

A partnership has been established with the master «Expertise ethnologique en patrimoine immatériel« at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès. A total of 24 hours seminars have been delivered.

The project attracted additional funding:
• The French Ministry of Culture co-funded the “collaborative dilemmas” workshop.
• An agreement is being elaborated between Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico s Artístico Nacional and EHESS to host a post-doc researcher generously made available to work within the project.

Collaborations with other projects:
• « PatriMondial : l’invocation du Mondial dans le Patrimoine culturel immatériel de l’UNESCO », University of Geneva (2017-2020) (CH).

Expertise and outreach:
• Centro Studi Silvia Santagata - CSS Ebla (IT)
• Unesco
• Centre français du patrimoine culturel immatériel (FR)
• Fondazione Feltrinelli (IT)
• Fondo per L’Ambiente Italiano-FAI (IT)
• Archivio di Etnografia e Storia Sociale- Regione Lombardia (IT) et Polo Poschiavo (CH)

Several UNESCO FRICTIONS’ research threads are being capitalised and further developed in international projects and collaborations:
• An interdisciplinary dialogue with legal scholars is being pursued in the framework of the project. The first perspective of this common reflection is the proposal of a special issue on ICH and foodways, accepted by the International Journal of Cultural Property.
• The reflection on collaborative dilemmas initiated by UNESCO FRICTIONS is being enhanced in collaboration with a larger group of researchers. Currently taking the form of an open virtual round-table it could develop into a publication and has potential to trigger a broader reflection on the epistemological impact of uncertainty in research practices, approaches and outcomes.
• A scientific collaboration between UNESCO FRICTIONS and an interdisciplinary research network on the participation requirement in heritage policies is established and may extend and enhance research on the association between heritage and participation with concrete impact on policy-making and implementation.

Edited volumes

Chiara Bortolotto, 2015 (with Nicolas Adell, Regina Bendix et Markus Tauschek), Between Imagined Communities and Communities of Practice: Participation, Territoritory and the Making of Heritage. Göttingen, Universitätsverlag Göttingen. En open access : resolver.sub.uni-goettingen.de/purl


Book chapters

Chiara Bortolotto, 2016, « Placing ICH, owning a tradition, affirming sovergnity: the role of spatiality in the practice of the ICH Convention », in P. Davis et M. Stefano The Routledge Companion to Intangible Cultural Heritage. London & New York, Routledge.

Chiara Bortolotto, 2015 (with Nicolas Adell, Regina F. Bendix, Chiara Bortolotto, and Markus Tauschek), « Introduction. Between Imagined Communities and Communities of Practice: Participation, Territory and the Making of Heritage », in Nicolas Adell, Regina F. Bendix, Chiara Bortolotto, and Markus Tauschek (dir.), Between „Imagined Communities? and „Communities of Practice?: Participation, Territoritory and the Making of Heritage. Göttingen, Universitätsverlag Göttingen : 7-21. Open access : resolver.sub.uni-goettingen.de/purl

Chiara Bortolotto, 2015, « UNESCO and Heritage Self-Determination: Negotiating Meaning in the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the ICH », in Nicolas Adell, Regina F. Bendix, Chiara Bortolotto, and Markus Tauschek (dir.), Between „Imagined Communities? and „Communities of Practice?: Participation, Territoritory and the Making of Heritage. Göttingen, Universitätsverlag Göttingen : 249-272. Open access : resolver.sub.uni-goettingen.de/purl

Reviews

Chiara Bortolotto, 2015, UNESCO, cultural heritage, and outstanding universal value: Value-based analyses of the World Heritage and Intangible Cultural Heritage Conventions, Labadi, Sophia, 2013. Lanham, Alta Mira Press, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 21 (5): 528-530.

This project explores cultural heritage policies in the era of global governance, focusing on their most recent and debated domain, that of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), and on its controversial key development, namely, the “participation” of “communities” in heritage identification and selection.
In tracing the social life of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage from diplomatic discussions in UNESCO boardrooms to the implementation of local heritage projects, this project investigates the entire policy chain that links the international arena where standards are negotiated, national heritage institutions where they are domesticated, and local heritage programs where they are implemented in three case-study countries (Greece, Brazil, and China), chosen on the grounds of the diversity of their national heritage regimes.
An ethnographic exploration of complex world governance sheds light on the interactions of particular actor networks in observable situations across multiple scales, thus allowing our analysis to go beyond the simplistic opposition between “global norm” and “local reactions”. In order to follow the successive translations of an international standard, the project focuses on the scenes of the encounter between different heritage regimes and explores the controversies arising from these regimes’ interpretations of the participatory shift introduced by the UNESCO convention.
As anthropological expertise overlaps with the field of ICH, we access these contact zones by engaging with ICH policy implementation as actors in the process we are observing. This original combination of multi-scale and comparative enquiry with collaborative ethnography introduces new developments in fieldwork design and ethnographic practice. A reflexive analysis of the radical complicity between researchers and research subjects has the potential to fill the theory/practice gap in heritage and beyond it, as it ultimately addresses the role of the anthropologist in society.