November 11, 2005
Measuring Heritage
Heritage is one of those words that when asked what it means, every person could answer something different. If asked to define in simple words before the readings I’d have said it has something to do with personal background and inherited identity. As the world’s population continues to organize and structure itself in ways that recognize global interaction, it has become necessary to define heritage in all its elements, tangible and intangible alike. Heritage, then, has become a contested topic. Through the process of examining, defining, and structuring something notably amorphic, heritage has become a space of powerful negotiations between personal and public, universal and individual, past and present, owned and inherited, borrowed, or stolen. Heritage has been turned into a measuring rod, a tool used to shape economics and politics. Through heritage, highly public bodies enter the personal; international political groups have formed in order to structure policy around controlling and mediating community relationships and cultural exchanges.
Globalization is as important a figure here as heritage. It is the motivating force for sculpting heritage in an international arena like WIPO. Although Steven Feld states that globalization is written about with either anxiety or celebration, throughout the readings there appeared to be more of a neutral consensus regarding the fact that globalization has brought more people into contact and as such, the emergent cultural exchange requires regulation and the establishment of ground rules. All of the articles deal with the complex relationship between the global community and cultural groupings. Feld describes globalization as an opportunity for highlighting cultural particularities as heard in music; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett describes the affects of globalization on pressuring destinations to define their uniqueness, as seen in museums and tourist marketing; Shand describes “cultural resistance” (57) as a response to neutralizing affects of contact between dominant cultural ethos and indigenous peoples; and Hafstein articulates globalization as a cultural shift towards integrative community approaches over individualism that requires legal change in order to match new modes of society.
The UNESCO conference in 2003 and the WIPO overview of policy objectives and core principles attempts to regulate the rules of cross cultural creative contact. WIPO acknowledges that no blanket law will work to monitor such practices but nonetheless seeks to define core principles and arrive at some form of consensus. (Who gets to participate in this consensus?) I found it interesting that a government produced document contained words like “balance,” “shared,” “interest of communities,” and “holistic cultural identity.” These terms and concepts seem so counter to the capitalist engine of world governments, yet these are the very engines that are trying to organize heritage and culture and are using terminology, thinking and practices of this engine to apply to something like a global holistic practice of protecting heritage. There is something disjointed about this.
UNESCO conceptualizes heritage as something that needs to be safeguarded. In order to work with such a topic, they characterize and subdivide heritage into three main categories of tangible, intangible, and natural. In World Heritage and Cultural Economics, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett conceptualizes heritage as a vehicle through which we envision a “global cultural commons” (7). Heritage is articulated as a transition zone, it is the point at which culture turns into an artifact of itself. Through display, endangered cultural elements are given a second chance at relevance yet the act of display changes this relevance and changes the relationship between the original cultural aspects and their creators. Something new and emergent is created when culture becomes heritage (10). Kirshenblatt-Gimblett looks at the UNESCO process of safeguarding (defined as defining, identifying, documenting, and presenting particular cultural tradition and practitioners) and redefines their three main heritage categories: tangible heritage equals inert objects; intangible heritage is inseparable from people; and natural heritage refers to the cultural space that involves people with an environment.
It is significant to note this process of protecting heritage is an inclusive process that allows people in, contrary to traditional creative protection laws which are designed to exclude people (BKG, 21). Hafstein’s Politics of Origin focuses on legal understandings of creativity in order to point out where systems of creative protection have failed to stay current with global contact and diverse forms of creative theory and practice. Through Intellectual Property and Patent law, the United States protects creativity, ingenuity, and industriousness of individuals. To earn such protection, the idea or creative element needs to have a proven and identifiable origin. This process precludes protection of communally originated creativity which creates a situation in which people of certain backgrounds automatically benefit from their system of creativity and others are automatically excluded. Hafstein identifies how intellectual property law fails, gives examples of how this failure cause community abuses, and requests folklore theory as well as government reconsider “copying as a creative act and creation as an act of reproduction” (310) to account for social creativity in places other than the genius of individual westerners. In so doing, heritage is conceived of as something of fiscal value. If no dollar amount could be attached, or no abuses to certain groups were made by way of appropriation without compensation, the topic would not even be debated. The UNESCO questions again arise as to how to value something intangible? Who gets credit and how? But in all of these questions, the focus is economic.
In A Sweet Lullaby for World Music, Steven Feld gets into particular detail about what takes place when such intellectual property laws are inadequate and cultural production of one group is exploited by a dominant, well oiled marketing machine, the music industry. Feld describes the progression of “world music” from an academic topic to a full fledged genre of packaged music. I recall the suddenness with which “World music” appeared on the genre cards labeling cds in my local music store. The word automatically makes me picture palm trees and animals and its connotation is nature and people making music that are in touch with nature. This was really a massive marketing success. Intellectual property policy failed as tribal sounds and recordings were appropriated, unrecognized, and profited from without giving proper credit or compensation to the artistic source. Feld's usage of the term heritage implies measurement of value. Heritage here is something owned and something stolen. Foundational to legislating and regulating heritage, is the lofty task of defining and monitoring creative process. The creative process is under scrutiny here and the path to improvement seems riddled with challenges to come up with a set of practices and guidelines that will make sense without compromising the spontaneity of creativity. Again I sense disjointedness. The authors want to improve the situation yet they use the language of that which is being rejected (flawed capitalism). These ideas sit outside the confines of the cultures they look to protect. It just seems at odds to apply economic structure to places where there is none, to benefit where there is none, and expect no change to happen to the source along the way. Clearly protection and organization is needed but it seems there must be some effect on creativity in general.
Posted by Erin Madorsky at 7:20 PM
November 8, 2005
Bullet points
Several students requested that I post my bullet points for yesterday's class, so here they are. They are my notes on interesting points that came up in your postings and that I thought would be good to discuss.
Leah: Jewish education
• plus the problem of the “work,” the “it,” vs its performance, iterations
• “diversity of cultural expressions” issue
• preservation vs safeguarding vs protection
• nostalgia as a comment on the present
Stella: Taiwan
• play and discuss recordings
Sarah Klein
• individual, community, humanity
• non-proprietary approach to IP issues
Brigitte: memorials
• her questions
Guzman: Day of the Dead in Mexico
• protection from commercialization (not preservation per se), maybe too alive
Aniko: post-communist Central European nations
• national contexts: her distinctions
• paradox: feed or abet nationalism
• comparison with theater (i.e. the collaborative arts)
• customary law, taxonomies, downside of insisting on collective creation (Shand: disempowerment)
• recourse to the past: whose past, what past
Pilar: East Timor; San; Latin America (Nestor Canclini on folklorization)
• definitional issues if everything is potentially heritage
• humanity issue in relation to diversity of producers
• inclusion in representation but political disenfranchisement (participation in process issues: Sandy; who decides who decides)
• what diversity means: she says people. Look at goods
• Dark picture: what to propose constructively
Dominika
• Foreclosure idea, exhibition value [raise the modernity theme]
• Dark: what to propose constructively
Tyler
• History vs heritage: explore distinction more fully
• Sampling: implications for the Deep Forest controversy. What performance studies might offer this analysis
• Ephemerality vs disappearance
• Ephemerality vs material registration as the basis for protection
• Individual/collective creation issue
• UNESCO and contamination!!!! Question this argument. Natural vs artificial….
Sandra
• “own” culture
• collective/individual creation
• item-centered problem (relate to UNESCO and inventories)
• NB: Her last few questions!!!!
Siobhan
• Read against Sandra’s last questions
• Tolerance vs celebration of difference/diversity
• Politics of origin
Sarah Zoogman: Williamsburg
• Metacultural definition of heritage
• Remembering and forgetting
• Diversity (celebrating diversity) vs relativity (tolerating difference)
Brynn
• Dark: solution?
Lisa
• Concept too broad
• Extinction not a real criteria in practice
Yo-Chi: Difang
Justine: Ugg Boot
• Tourism/heritage connection (Silk Roads)
• Recontextualization as heritage
Senti Toy: Nagaland
• Cultural diversity treaty--USA’s objectives
• Indigenous appropriations--go to her explanations
Michelle
• Celebrating diversity / toleration difference
• Culture vs heritage (and who should be the judge)
Scott: International House festival; LESTM (irony); Jamaica
• My arguments re foreign context, exhibition value, etc.
• “What is the deal with living treasures?”
• “You’re damned either way”
Posted by BKG at 9:36 PM
November 7, 2005
Leah on heritage
I was most intrigued by the recurring interplay between notions of the “individual” and the “collective” regarding the issue of “heritages” and their preservation and how these ideas played out on a wide variety of levels of activity. The word “heritage” usually implies a collectivity, whether it is referring to those receiving it, those who produce it or to the cultural materials and practices themselves. Current legal understandings of intellectual property favor the product of individual creativity.
Heritage, then, whatever cultural product it is referring to, requires for its preservation the construct of a categorization that allows it to maintain a sense of collectivity while being somehow unique. Hence it seems to me not accidental that the full name of the WIPO Committee which deals with these issues draws an implicit parallel with the most personal individual physical matter identified by science as well as by law: it is called “the Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, traditional Knowledge and Folklore.” (It seems to me as well that the field of intellectual property has grown out of a similar movement to redefine individual property so that “intellectual” productions can be claimed as property in the same way as land, real estate, stocks, etc.
Again, there is an economic motivation here in a world whose global economy is enabled and hence dominated by a variety of business devoted to intellectual productions and the materials that they put out in the marketplace.) It is the economic salience of “intellectual property” that allows for “invisible cultural heritage” to enter the legal realm as a product that can be practicably defined and hence defended from appropriation. As Hafstein noted in “The Politics of Origins: Collective Creation Revisited,” “The criteria of originality and novelty are central to copyright and patent law, as well as to various intellectual property rights of more recent vintage.” (p. 305) I also thought of the difference between “heritage” and “heirloom” (a particular item of property) and how each is defined and inherited. I also found Hafstein’s description of the development of performance theory in folklore interesting because one theoretical move that shifts “heritage” from the collective to the individual is the shift from the “material” itself to the “performance” of it – with each performer offering a unique interpretation of the material. If the invisible material of heritage is difficult to identify for the purposes of legal protection, the performance of it or the delineation of a tourist destination as a “heritage” site are different iterations that facilitate both production and protection along these lines.
The preservation of heritage may also be motivated by ideological beliefs or arguments, but the upkeep of preservation requires economic resources of various kinds. Hence, heritage must be conceptually packaged as something which can yield economic activity and, as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett points out, developing and evoking the very notion of “preservation” is one mode of doing so. In the development of heritage sites for tourism the collective audience is not necessarily one that feels a sense of ownership towards the heritage being presented. In “Destination Museum” Kirshenblatt-Gimblett describes museums as places for the consumption of such messages, producers of heritage designed to attract tourists on a journey where “The destination is collective self-understanding.” (p. 139) For the most expansive economic possibilities to be realizable, this ability to generate “self-understanding” must be achievable by both those tourists who come seeking to understand their own cultural heritage and by hose tourists who come to see an example of the “other” or a past to which their ancestors do not claim direct connection. This reliance on tourism creates an opportunity for those organizations that work on a global scale to enter the arena of heritage as legal and cultural arbiters. This includes both businesses who service and benefit from the use of industries that enable tourism to heritage destinations as well as organizations such as WIPO and, most notable UNESCO, that work to regulate and mediate international exchanges of various kinds.
The dichotomy between “individual” and “collective” also plays out on the global scale: as the world grows more inter-connected and communications more extensive and immediate the “individuality” of particular cultures and their heritages become more endangered. (One might consider this as the wear and tear of tourism usage magnified by the opportunities of “virtual” travel.) A visit to the UNESCO Web site and its page on “Culture” (under “Themes” on the home page) leads to an article about a general conference held last month which included the passing of a resolution on an “international normative instrument” designed for “the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expression.” This instrument builds on a resolution passed in 2001, the “UNESCO declaration on Cultural Diversity,” and a request in 2003 to realize the operation of this resolution “to pursue its normative action to defend human creativity.” The article goes on to specify that “a series of Guiding Principles (Article Two) guarantees that all measures aimed at protecting and promoting the diversity of cultural expressions does not hinder respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” This caveat makes clear that part of the power over cultural preservation that is being claimed by UNESCO is related to the protection of human rights, the prime territory of the UN and all of its operations. The bottom line here is the largest ideological endeavor on the global scale: the protection of individual human rights world-wide. Cultural preservation is elevated to the same level on the world stage but does not trump the pride of place given to the collective world project of ensuring individual human rights. The interplay between individual and collective on this level is also striking: that a collective global body can claim the position of preserving humanity’s rights and treasures on a global scale.
This too is business on a global scale, but one developed under the rubric of international exchanges along governmental and political lines. In other words, the richness of heritage is important to protect but only if it conforms with peaceful co-existence and respect for others. The collectivity of humanity supercedes the individuality of cultures if they impede on other cultures. In “World Heritage and Cultural Economic” Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues that “world heritage is a vehicle for envisioning and constituting a global polity within the conceptual space of a global cultural commons.” She discusses the “tension between diversity and relativity” among cultures, and the need for co-existence in order to ensure peace and prosperity for all, to reiterate the goals of UNESCO. I wonder how the creation of an “instrument” by UNESCO which can be used by the organization to monitor and judge activities around preservation of heritage might become contentious: much will depend on how the instrument is used, what authority UNESCO claims or is able to assert, and how the instrument works in the field and is perceived by those whose work is evaluated by it. The shift from grand intention to implementing the practice of guiding or potentially reinforcing practice is in itself a possible site for future debates about human rights and power.
A number of the readings touch upon the idea of “nostalgia” as a motivator for the production of heritage experiences; the article “U.S. Department of Retro Warns: ‘We May Be Running Out of Past.” Reading this article reminded me of the extent to which my “generation” (Generation X) was the target of critique during the waves of retro fashion in the 90s that focused on the 70s and 80s. The critique implied that a generation that was barely grown up should not be already yearning for the simplicity of its childhood years. The term “nostalgia” refers to homesickness, a yearning to return to home. I wonder what message might be understood by older generations if the youngest generation of adults develops – or responds so readily to the production of - such a strong case of nostalgia for the recent past. What does this say about the conditions of the present?
I am also interested in notions of “heritage” and how it should be preserved and reproduced because I work in a field, Jewish education, which ostensibly revolves around the purpose of “transmitting” a “heritage” for its “preservation” or ongoing “production” across generations. The tensions that often surfaces in Jewish education arise from the endeavor being predicated on the assumption that enrolling one’s children in an educational program ensures they will “receive” the transmission of heritage and in turn be committed to ensuring its reproduction with the next generation after them. What usually remains unacknowledged or unexamined is how these students feel about what is being transmitted to them, whether they find the heritage received – or the attached expectations – meaningful, and how their affective reactions help to shape the way the “heritage” being taught will be transmitted. The modes of preservation in Jewish education sometimes include the kinds of activities and settings (museums, production of cultural and artistic materials) discussed in our readings, but the primary vehicles of preservation in Jewish education are the students (and teachers) themselves, both as individuals and as a collective or set of collectives.
Implicit in these latter two examples is also the question of whether heritage, or the cultural productions which are being framed and valued in particular ways, are meant to be seen as inescapably “past” or “present.” And, if present, are they meant to be “preserved” and “re-enacted” whole-scale as they were received? At a conference of young Jewish educators that I attended in 1998 a participant shared her sudden revelation regarding the then-cutting edge term of “Jewish continuity” (still in usage) as applied to Jewish education and cultural endeavors. “Oh now I get it,” she said, “they want us to preserve it – they don’t want us to change it.” Hence, what are the boundaries of the performance or re-enactment of heritage and how are they shaped by ideological suppositions? For students who live in a multi-cultural world of global scale these questions are not theoretical as they grapple with how and in what way to proffer a particular heritage and its practices in a multitude of humanity. The onus is often then on the valuing of particular heritage to be both compelling and consonant with the global vision for world peace and prosperity. The balance that UNESCO tries to strike is one answer to this dilemma on the largest scale.
Posted by BKG at 10:58 AM
The establishment of the safeguarding system of heritage
In "The Politics of Origins," Valdimar Tr. Hafstein, exposes the problem that folklore, which does not fall into the category of the creation of the individual, is not, in most cases, under the protection of the intellectual property laws. Further, he also indicates the problematic process of privatizing knowledge of the indigenous, which can be regarded as another form of colonialization of the Third world.
In Valdimar Tr. Hafstein's article, he also introduces R.Barthes' notion of intertextuality, whcih abolishes the search of origins of the texts (307). With this insight, the creativity is never individual, rahter it is communal and exists only in certain social ambiance and cultural milieu. As Valdimar Tr. Hafstein concludes in the last paragraph, folklore can be read as "communal origination through individual re-creation." The rejection of the dicothomy of traditional creativity and indivudual novelty can give people a new insight into the making of the intellectual property laws.
In Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's Destination Culture, part II, Destination Museum, she deciphers the creation of tourist destionations. By referring to the advertisements of the tourism in New Zealand, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett indicates that stressing the uniqueness of a geographical location is essential to turning it into a tourist destination (140). In this part of the book, as its name implies, deals with how tourism induces the policy of the destination museums, or more precisely, how tourism indirectly manipulates museums' selections of the diaplayed objects and the running of the museums in general.
When reading "Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage and WIPO", I have an impression that, despite the nuances between different policy statements, they have something in common in terms of their coming into shape. They are both produced on the basis of certain theoratical, ideological, or even philosophical ground. As Hafstein has mentioned in "The Politics of Origins" that the making of the intellectual property law is mainly based on the thoughts of Hegel and Kant, the statements of policy also have their own basis. They are the concretization of the abstract theories and thoughts.
These readings on heritage, safeguarding heritage, and the problem of legality inspire me to think about the historical events in Chinese history (I use "Chinese" as a cultural adjective, instead of a political one). I have to aplogize in advence if any of you finds these events taking place in a Pacific island irrelevant to explaining the concept of safeguarding heritage as a matter of selection based on certain ideology, on political stance.
There was a time that speaking Taiwanese in public was restricted, or even prohibitted in Taiwan. Such policy was the result of KMT government's mainderine movement, which stressed the importance of preserving the Chinese traditional culture as well as asserting the legitimacy of the Chiang Kai-Shek (CKS) administration forced to Taiwan by the Chinese Communist party. In the process of evacuating to Taiwan, the KMT government/Chiang Kai-Shek administration, took a considerable number of precious ancient Chinese artifacts with them and established the National Palace Museum in Taipei. I personally think, the National Palace Museum can be read as CKS' reminiscence of the mainland China. To some extend, the safeguarding of these cultural heritage was/is the continuation of the Chinese culture and the proof of CKS' legitimacy as the leader of "the whole" China. Now the political atmousphere has changed. The DPP government, which replaced KMT and came to power couple of years ago, advocates the indigenization movement that prioritizes the Taiwanese and aboriginal cultures as the objects of reservation and objective of development. The DPP government alters the proportion between old Chinese and modern Chinese (my term) in high school textbooks, in hope that students can have more exposure to Taiwanese literature and identify themselves as Taiwanese, rather than Chinese.
In my opinion, though highly political, the two movements of safeguarding cultural heritage have their own drawbacks and "positive side-effects." To read things in a more possitive way, here, I would like to omit the drawbacks and elaborate on the possitive effects created by these movements. CKS' carrying Chinese artifacts unintentionally prevented those cultural heritage/national treasure from the devastating sabotage during the "Cultural Revolution" launched by Chinese Communist. The DPP's indigenization movement make people like me, who is genealogically Taiwanese but speaks broken Taiwanese, to refamiliarize myself with this culture.
The safeguarding of cultural heritage, no matter tangible or not tangible, involves with a process of selection based on certain criterion. I personally think that no one can be one hundred percent certain about what kind of result such safeguarding may lead to.
I apologize for me terrible lateness. My computer crashed and I sent quite a lot of time fixing it. It is not a good excuse, but I do want to give all of you an explanation. Sorry again!
Posted by Stella Yu-Wen Wang at 4:03 AM
November 6, 2005
Global Heritage and Legal Heritage
In reading the various texts on heritage for this week, I noted two main conceptualizations of the problem of heritage: the first, as introduced by UNESCO’s “Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage” initiative and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett in her writings on the Silk Road and the museum, is the preservation of heritage insofar as it is a humanitarian effort - the safeguarding of heritage for the sake of humanity. This conceptualization of heritage is characterized by an anxiety that humanity is at risk of losing its heritage(s) to globalization. Paradoxically, as BKG notes in “World Heritage and Economics”, heritage initiatives depend on the very same processes of globalization that they purport to protect against.
In the case of museums, festivals, and other cultural “sights”, global tourism is economically necessary for these cultural institutions (and the practices they house and protect) to be maintained. In these cases, the one of the guiding forces behind heritage’s protection/production is that it belongs to all of humanity.
On the other side of the spectrum we have those thinkers and those initiatives who attempt to deal with heritage in terms of Intellectual Property. This is also, in a way, an attempt to protect traditions from disappearance, but more than that, it seems that they are attempting to protect the producers and “proprietors” of those cultural expressions from having their cultural forms appropriated and exploited by politically and economically dominant outsiders.
These two angles on heritage are interrelated and also strangely antithetical: how can something be simultaneously one’s and everyone’s? How can something belong to both a community, and to all of humanity? Maybe a roundabout answer is that the UNESCO heritage safeguarding program and the WIPO program are operating in different discursive disciplines. The former is operating in the zone of ideology, of not only nation-building but world-building, becoming what BKG calls a “meta-cultural” term, and I would suggest, even a meta-cultural value. The latter is operating within the “legal system”, but in the case of intellectual property law, the attempt to create an international system within a complex network of existing legal systems.
Oddly enough, though the legal discourse of IP seems to be dealing in pragmatics and actualities, in reading the WIPO document on “The protection of Traditional Cultural Expressions/ Expressions of Folklore” it becomes clear that this is not actually a body of law yet, but a series of “suggestions” and proposals towards how to make this complex protection mechanism effective when it does come into being. “The objectives and principles set out in this document are suggestions only. They do not seek to place limits on the parameters of the debate concerning TCEs/EoF protection, to prescribe any particular outcomes or solutions, nor to define the legal form that they may take.”(WIPO document Intro p 5). Part of the difficulty, as is laid out by Hafstein and Rikoon, is that the Western legal system is based on the concept of property, and while WIPO attempts to account for that by including the directive to consider “non-proprietary” ways of considering TCEs/EoF,actual examples of how to do this are not given, and the extent to which “non-proprietary” models for understanding culture might undermine the goal of the protection of intellectual property is not considered. Rikoon suggests that in order to reconcile the seemingly disparate notions of intellectual property and communally imagined/created cultural expression we must pay more attention to the community and context from which each “item” emerges rather than place so much weight on the “item” itself. If a more context-based approach is taken, the “item” is relieved of the pressure to prove its “originality”, which, as most of the readings of the week would agree, is inappropriate in the case of traditional cultural expressions that are not “unique”, “original”, or “authored” in the western legal sense.
If, as BKG claims, ‘heritage’ is produced, is something new, then what is the ‘heritage’ produced by WIPO and intellectual property/legal discourse, and how does it differ from the ‘heritage’ produced by UNESCO and other “safeguarding” initiatives? While these two notions of heritage are undoubtedly different, they are alike in that they are both responses to the various threats posed to heritage by the looming phenomenon of globalization. Both notions try to “work with what is there” rather than halt or reverse the path of the current system. Global tourism, and human mobility in general have made both exhibition and exploitation of culture possible, and both notions of heritage (theoretically) seek to empower heritage practitioners.
Posted by Sarah Klein at 9:46 PM
Heritage Lost
This week's readings offer definitions of Heritage that complement eachother: according to Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, heritage is the outcome of a process,a new product she calls "metaculture", i.e. "what is created-as opposed to safeguarded-when culture becomes heritage" (Museum Frictions, 10).Valdimar Hafstein focuses more on the makers of heritage when he talks about "communal origination through individual re-creation", while Peter Shand emphasizes the nature of this new object as "artificial" and inclusive of "many facets"(48).
These readings underline the fate of culture, whether tangible or intangible, when a "safeguarding" process is achieved. Rather than preserve an artifact or a performance, the preservation transforms its object into something else.
We seem to face a no-win situation: either we leave the culture alone, with the risk of having elements disappear with time, or we try to preserve it, with the risk of altering its nature. Unless we follow Diana Taylor's path, according to which intangible treasures (such as performances) are preserved in the repertoire and the scenarios, without the need of a traditional fixating archive (books, tapes, recordings). Or we look at what some indigenous people do with archival technology, and how they use it to their advantage (I think of the Kayapo Indians and their use of video).
While preservation seems like a generous idea, it creates a number of problems:
- who owns the culture that is preserved, and what is the purpose of preservation? Is is sheer necessity to keep a gem, or are they political goals, economic goals or is it a way of reappropriating a culture (as in the New Zealand/Maori case)?
- who owns the rights of reproduction? (a people or a person, the colonial government or the indigenous people, the copyright holder or nobody at all?)
- How much is being altered by the preservation process (I especially think of the risk of synchretism, dilution and partial - rosy- view)?
At the same time, the issue of transormation of culture for the sake of preserving it informs us of the essential role played by the external audience (from anthropologists to tourists to reporters to UNESCO envoys)and its gaze.
Another issue at stake is the role of international organizations in deciding what needs to be preserved, shortlisted, and funded. Unfortunately, their principles obey political and economical pressures, and I'm not sure an international body is the best place to decide what is worth safeguarding, and how to hierarchize heritage sites.
While my research doesn't deal litterally with heritage, I still found the readings thought-provoking in two ways:
- Memorials, like museums, have become part of tourism circuits: how does this affect the design and construction of contemporary memorials (such as the Holocaust memorial in Berlin) and how that is alter the function of a memorial, i.e., its role in remembering a tragedy?
- when a memorial is built by the perpetrators of a mass killing, or their descendants, should we suspect some kind of reappropriation of the tragedy for political purposes, decades after that tragedy? in concrete terms, does the fact that contemporary Germany spent so much time, prime-real-estate ground, and money to be a Holocaust memorial in downtown Berlin show some kind of reappropriation of Holocaust memory today, to offer a positive, honest and candid image of "the new Germany", while, at the same time, turning the page on the darkest chapter of its history?
to be continued...
Posted by Brigitte Sion at 5:33 PM
so much info...gahhhhh
Heritage. It is apparent the word is being misused, abused, and it is slowly becoming devoid of meaning. It was impossible to go through each reading without referring to the definition again and again. In her text Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage, BKG offers a definition of heritage which should definitely be adopted by heritage organizations. It follows: "Heritage produces something new in the present that has recourse to the past" (150). It seems as though the past is often times overlooked.
The Onion article made it clear that we soon will have no past if we keep bringing back yesterday today. It appears that heritage organizations are blurring today and yesterday to develop a purpose for their objective. UNESCO's ambition to "safeguard" heritage undoubtedly develops a tourist economic basis. "Heritage and tourism are collaborative industries, heritage converting locations into destinations and tourism making them economically viable as exhibits of themselves" (51). Heritage organizations undoubtedly fall into the category of the "conciousness industry" where the art world and museums realize that they "must be profitable to survive and so are looking to cultural tourism for income" (144).
UNESCO illustrates a “Presentation of their Masterpieces” online and when browsing through the website I came upon UNESCO’s effort to preserve Mexico’s El Dia De Los Muertos. UNESCO actually states that “the tradition faces no major threat” but “its significance for practitioners could easily be lost” and therefore needs immediate protection. Its action plan declares that “The festivity’s metaphysical and aesthetic dimensions will be protected from the growing number of non-indigenous commercial and recreational activities that tend to obscure its spiritual character” meaning that UNESCO is interested in protecting the tradition from organizations who find it acceptable to impose--much like themselves.
When looking back at the above example (El Dia De Los Muertos), it is evident that the event is in no danger, but legal protection is purposed for the festival and activities. In his essay "The Politics of Origins: Collective Creation Revisited," Valdimar Tr. Hafstein presents WIPO's attempts to acquire legal protection for cultural practices exploited by dominant countries, and explores the controversy between originality and tradition. Hafstein purposes the following concept: Communal origination through individual re-creation. Maybe it is my unfamiliarity with the issue, but is possibly too late to apply this folklore? How is it possible for new concepts of originality to exist when heritage organizations are fixed on "designating" and "saving" the old ones?
In a lecture presented to our intro class this past summer, BKG purposed that it just might be that disappearance is a good thing. This notion is further explored in her article "World Heritage and Cultural Economics" where she reinforces her statement, "If [heritage] is truly vital, it does not need safeguarding; if it is almost dead, safeguarding will not help" (7).
Posted by Alma Guzman at 3:32 PM
Whose is this right anyway?
The following definition of ‘heritage’ can be derived from BKG’s article, “Destination Museum”: heritage is a form of cultural industry that produces, re-evaluates the present of the local as a virtual recourse to the past for the purpose of export (146). What is clear from my slightly contrived extraction is that ’world heritage’ is a power construction: it is constructed to practice the power to produce, canonize and ultimately (in a most optimistic reading) to protect the natural, intangible and tangible heritage through organizations such as UNESCO and WIPO.
In the investigation of Intangible Heritage a most important distinction needs to be made. Although the “Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage” differentiates between “national” (III) and “international” (IV) levels, neither UNESCO nor the WIPO recognizes that the politics of heritage is radically different in the postcolonial, indigenous context from the local folklore of Eurasian nation-states. This distinction is needed not only because of the earlier oppressing power-relations between the West and the colonies, but also because of the different roles that the heritage of folklore and cultural heritage of indigenous communities plays in contemporary societies and communities. While national folklore is not a significant identity-forming force in contemporary nation-states (with the exception of the nationalist discourse), the tradition of indigenous cultures is still a most important component in their identity-formation. Therefore, interpreting ‘world heritage’ as a ‘metacultural’ production which belongs to humanity (BKG 1994, 2005) set different kinds of dynamics into motion. In the context of the Eurasian nation-states, the incorporation of folklore into the realm of ‘world heritage’ creates a controversial situation: while folklore, a most essential instrument, feeds nationalism on a local level, in a supranational context it becomes an instrument to “prevent resurgent nationalism” (26). In the nationalist discourse, the ownership of ‘humanity’ will be reduced to the ownership of the ‘nation’.
The incorporation of the cultural traditions of the indigenous peoples into ‘world heritage’ create other controversies; many of them are formulated by BKG (“World Heritage and Cultural Economics”) Valdimar Tr. Hafstein (”The Politics of Origins”), Peter Shand (“Scenes from the Colonial Catwalk”) and Steven Feld (“A Sweet Lullaby for World Music). The common idea that links these articles together are the laws of intellectual properties in postcolonial folklore. The case studies of these articles explore the ways in which intellectual properties should be acknowledged and balanced in form of royalties or other compensation to indigenous cultures.
What makes the recognition of intellectual property difficult in the arena of folklore is its ‘communal’ nature. Intellectual Property laws are made to protect the individual author’s right, and as such are incapable of regulating communal creations, whether it is in the field of tradition or contemporary art. (For instance, while playwrights, directors, composers and choreographers are acknowledged as a theatre performance’s “creators” and receive a certain per cent of box office income as royalties, this privilege is denied from the actors, although they equally contribute to the creative process.) Therefore, it is important to recognize and emphasize that intellectual property rights of communal creations need to be developed both in the West and in indigenous folklore, as well as contemporary art.
Why is the case then different with indigenous art? Although neither of the above mentioned authors argue explicitly for this distinction, their focus on postcolonial context suggests that indigenous art is a more fragile sphere when it comes to copyrights, patents, etc. And they include several arguments into their essays: Hafstein quotes the Russian delegate claiming that “the majority of the holders are poor and poorly educated” (301). Shand claims that ‘intellectual property’ needs to be reconceptualized in indigenous art, since they define their own intellectual property in a different way and “treat tangible heritage differently from knowledge”, resisting the “taxonomical division of intellectual or other areas” (60), while Feld argues that the concept of the oral tradition "can easily be manipulated, from signifying that which is vocally communal to signifying that which belongs to no one in particular" (161).
Hafstein’s proposal, “the social concept of creativity” and the interpretation of traditions as a post-modern intertextual network (306), is appropriate. However, I argue that it is only applicable to nation-state folklore for two different reasons. First, let me recall our starting point, the definition of ‘world heritage’ as “ a new mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past.” (BKG: 149). However, the question here is what kind of past is in recourse. Whether it is a mosaic of “meta-retro”; encompassing different moments of a nation’s own history and traditions, or a past of oppression; a history of peoples deprived of any kind of human or cultural rights. Rikoon argues, with good reason, that in this latter context “grand theories of intertextuality and interdependence actually may serve as means of disempowerment” (330).
Second, even more importantly, the post-modern intertextuality presupposes reciprocity. I have the right to access and take anything I want from your culture, and in turn your culture has the right to take whatever it wants from mine. However, in the case of indigenous cultures, this mutual relationship still needs to be established. In the centuries of oppression, it has never become part of their cultural practice to incorporate elements from different traditions.
Once again, ‘world heritage’ is a forceful power, and as with every power-structure, it is equally easy to use and abuse. If we agree with BKG that ‘world heritage’ belongs to humanity, then we also need to recognize that being part of this heritage might easily turn into a Catch 22 situation: the moment the ‘world heritage’ forms (or transforms into) a global public sphere (BKG, 2005:23), the real challenge becomes how to protect world heritage (see authenticity, intellectual property, etc.) in/from the global public sphere.
Ideally, the formation of the ‘world heritage’ should be a gradual process, similar to the EU or the United Nations. Cultures should join when they are politically/financially/culturally ready to do so. Unfortunately, this is not the case. In the age of globalization, most cultures simultaneously and automatically have become part of this ‘global public sphere’. Therefore, the best that can be hoped for is the establishment of a kind of “cast-system”, in which the “olders” (in this case the West) protect the younger (the indigenous, who are in fact older) from power abuse. And in my reading this is what BKG, Hafstein, Rikoon, Feld and Shand encourages in different ways.
Posted by Aniko Szucs at 2:06 PM
S.O.H.
Save our Heritage.
On the one hand, the idea of legislating the Heritage of Humanity seems absurd and unfair and it is an alienating meta-cultural operation. On the other hand, it may be seen as a politically-neutral way of preventing genocide.
Independence celebration East Timor 2002
The first challenge the project of safeguarding of the heritage of humanity has, is how to define itself. Keeping in mind it is the project of consensus of an international group of legal and diplomatically minded actors, the absurd qualities of its definition should come as no surprise. As the Atlantic Monthly articles making fun of it highlights, everyone has intangible heritage. But what makes the cut? The primary mechanism for creating world heritage is the creation of universal standards for designating masterpieces. For a cultural expression to qualify as a masterpiece of human heritage, it must be distinctive, distinguished, as well as endangered –and yet, but sufficiently intact. While all people, in theory, have the same universal human rights, some cultural expressions are more worth saving than others.
A second disturbing element of the heritage of humanity project is the alienation that occurs between producer and product when the habitus of one group becomes part of the global public domain. In “World Heritage and Cultural Economics,” Kishenblatt-Gimblett “demonstrate[s] how valorization, regulation, and instrumentalization alter the relationship of cultural assets to those who are identified with them, as well as to others. More specifically, such instrumentalizations produce an asymmetry between the diversity of those who produce cultural assets in the first place and the humanity to which those assets come to belong as world heritage” (2). An improvement over previous salvage models of folklore, intangible heritage initiatives are meant to protect and promote the culture-producers rather than jus their goods. However, as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett recognizes, in safe guarding, there is the potential to make “human zoos” (Destination Museum). For example, the San of South Africa were moved off an endangered species reserve, then moved back on to be part of the spectacle. In John Marshall’s films, we find them neither able to hunt, as they traditionally did, nor to develop agriculture since it is not their “culture.” Their unviable lifestyle (due to the fact that they are not politically able to maintain their rights to land) keeps them in dependence on NGOs that keep them in thrall as a spectacle. Heritage of humanity has the potential to function like an endangered species reserve.
Reading the UNESCO web pages on Heritage, I encountered a lot of political double-talk that we cannot possibly understand from the written texts. I wonder what is really going on in these meetings. Nestor Garcia Canclini points out that “folklorization” has been a means by which nation-building projects symbolically incorporate and coopt diverse cultures while denying them real political enfranchisement. In addition to its uses the world over by national governments, could this not also be a weapon of the weak?
“Culture” and “customs” seem harmless. As any social science researcher knows, it is tough to get clearance to study conflict, it’s easy to get permission t study “customs.” By the same token, diplomatically and militarily, it is really hard to stop ethnic cleansing. It takes the international community a long time to figure out what is going on in militarized situations. Are the people in question freedom fighters? Dissidents? Freeloaders encroaching on valuable private property? National sovereignty is at stake when the decision is made to send in outside forces send peace-keeping troops. Plus, not everyone is willing to finance military intervention. On the other hand, it is really easy to give governments money in celebration of their “rich heritage,” to preserve the cute customs of their minority peoples. Lots of liberal people would happily donate money to preserve arts and crafts or folk music. Some would even be willing to visit.
Framing the protection of “diversity” as the property of “humanity” is a problematic strategy. We are witnessing the formation of an inter-national bureaucratic structure that protects ethnic diversity of vulnerable sub-national groups. While recognition in this arena does not grant groups sovereignty, it does give them some kind of cultural capital and political leverage. It asymmetrically frames some people in this world as the entertainers and some as the spectators. And it is a meta-cultural operation that, making habitus into heritage, contains it, depicts it as safely in the past, and protects it. While it is alienating to the people whose habitus has become the property of humanity, it does give them spectators and sympathizers on the world stage, and a strange meta-pidgin language with which to communicate to them. At this moment when tourism and non-Western forms of cultural production are so lucrative and important to developing national economies, for some vulnerable groups in need of protection from their national governments, becoming part of the Heritage of Humanity may function as a kind of refugee camp, where instead of having their human rights protected by soldiers, while living in sub-human conditions, they enact a relationship to aspects of their culture, to which, in so doing, they become alienated.
Deploying “cultural” initiatives rather than military might be like indicting mafia leaders for mail fraud instead of murder. It gets the job done. Maybe I am attributing too much astuteness to the members of this UNESCO Division. Especially as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett points out, the chief products so far have been lists and proclamations.
Posted by Pilar Rau at 1:59 PM
the gods (UNESCO & WIPO) must be crazy
The chapter “Destination Museum” in Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage, acts as a vehicle of transport between the overlapping and porous discourses of tourism and heritage. Exposing the intimate connections between tourism and museums i.e. museums as surrogates for travel (132), whole countries marketed as “open air museums” (131), museums’ reproduction of protocols of travel (135), Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett displays the reciprocal and recursive nature of the two as: “the exhibition of the world and the world as exhibition of itself.” (144)
From this discourse emerges a notion of heritage defined as “a new mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past.” (149) This conceptualization of heritage is distinct from earlier notions precisely because of the emphasis on the creative aspects of its production in the present. The remainder of the chapter is a tour of the backstage area of heritage productions. This insightful discussion of heritage and its operational aspects prove particularly useful in navigating the terrain of the heritage industry and its challenges. All seven aspects of heritage elucidated have a profound and far reaching consequences on the heritage industry. For instance, of particular significance in relation to the UNESCO project for the safeguarding of intangible heritage, is the discussion of heritage as a process that forecloses what is shown. (159-165) It is disquieting, for example, that - among others - the notion that “documentation and exhibition are implicated in the disappearance of what they show” (162) is significantly missing from UNESCO’s discourse of safeguarding.
In “World Heritage and Cultural Economics,” Kirshenblatt-Gimblett takes UNESCO’s safeguarding efforts to task. While exposing the asymmetry and paradoxical character of the global cultural commons, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett shows how world heritage is created through Metacultural operations that extend museological values and methods to living persons. (1) In this scenario “Living National Treasures” experience a new Metacultural relationship to what once was merely “habitus.” (1-2)
“Indigenous and local communities justly cherish traditional knowledge (TK) as a part of their very cultural identities.” , proclaims the opening statement of a booklet published by The World Intellectual Property Organization. But how is it possible to encapsulate the complex and nuanced web of relationships that various indigenous groups and local communities have to themselves and their traditional knowledge, in such a broadly sweeping generalization? In the aftermath of colonization and the onset of globalization many cultures termed as “traditional” are in fact rejecting their own cultural identities. The overwhelmingly oppressive rhetoric of colonization has instilled self-hatred in many indigenous populations. The repercussions of the global expansion of the commercial market have cemented the job by fabricating and spreading infectious desire for consumption. The seemingly insatiable fascination with the “West” and the desire to emulate the American life-style plagues numerous “local communities” and acts as an impetus for the rejection, completely or in part, of their own “cultural identity.”
At the present, one would be hard pressed to find a “traditional” society where the objects of the Western market have not leaked. “Pure” societies no longer exist. There is no escaping it. If it’s not the Coca-Cola bottle that falls on the head of the Junt-wasi of the Kalahara Desert, there will be another herald.
Since the Second World War UNESCO has been developing several world heritage initiatives, namely the tangible, the natural and most recently the intangible heritage initiative. In attempting to define the parameters of intangible heritage UNESCO has formerly associated the term with folklore. In recent years, however, there has been a marked shift in the concept of intangible heritage. Whereas formerly its meaning referred to masterpieces only, now it includes the masters.
The establishment of a cultural heritage policy is extremely problematic and raises a multitude of questions, which cannot be contended with easily. UNESCO purports to be the guardians of “intangible heritage”, but isn’t this a more subtle form of cultural colonization? A possible scenario: the state actors of UNESCO will promote a living national treasure to the status in which he or she will be mummified alive. Specially trained cultural heritage workers will encroach, with their cameras and sound recording devices in hand, and proceed to carefully document and create an archive. What’s more they will generously intercede and teach the local and indigenous people how to turn themselves into subjects of study, dissection and preservation. Discreetly, under the guise of safeguarding, they will perpetrate an inconspicuous form of forced assimilation. This sort of intervention, although well intended, is nothing more than the imposition of the Western anthropological model on non-Western societies, the result of which might be a well-oiled culture machine manufacturing and reproducing the recipients of traditional knowledge.
The goals of well-intentioned (?) organizations such as UNESCO or WIPO, should not be so flippantly dismissed. There are certainly ethical responsibilities that “first world” countries have to face for their continued suppression of indigenous people, as witnessed by the asymmetry of intellectual property rights in the world music phenomenon. In a crushing transnational market economy financial backing of indigenous groups is indispensable. This can be regarded as financial retribution for the theft and exploitation perpetrated on indigenous peoples. However, the proposed intangible heritage and other cultural policy projects must be carefully reexamined.
Posted by Dominika Bennacer at 1:46 PM
Typing like the proverbial Dickens
The breadth of topics in today’s reading does a good job of demonstrating just how far ranging the conceptions of heritage are. Despite various approaches to aspects of the topic by Feld, UNESCO, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Shand and Hafstein, any concrete definition continues to elude me. Instead, I find myself confronted by varying interpretations of a slippery term, each dependent upon the agenda of the person making the definition, and their relationship with the “heritage” material.
Feld presents a good illustration of the disparity in perceptions of heritage in his recounting of the history of the “Rorogwela.” Rather than proposing a solution to the Rorogwela issue, he shows how many viewpoints are at play. There’s the UNESCO view that the lullaby belongs to a long history of oral tradition for the people of the Solomon Islands, the most recognizable version “composed” by Afunakwa. Tied to this view is the view of the ethnomusicologist that first recorded the music. Hugo Zemp acknowledges the cultural heritage of the Solomon’s that generated this music, but now has his own personal interest in it. Though he advocates for credit to be given to Afunakwa and her people, he also seeks credit for himself as the original recorder responsible for introducing the world to the cultural artifact of the song. Thus, he is an integral part of “Rorogwela’s” heritage.
Before proceeding, I wish to make clear that I’m not using the terms heritage and history interchangeably. Rather, I think that history is contained within the definition of heritage as an inseparable part.
Now then, from Zemp, we move to Deep Forest who views the song as merely an exotic oddity or worse. As Feld writes on 165, “From the initial standpoint of the sampler, Afunakwa is not a person but a sound, from the subsequent standpoint of the arranger that sound is a melody and not a distinct performance.” The latter portion of this quote covers the views of Garbarek, while the first part that of Deep Forest.
What Feld’s article does then, in addition to exposing the many legal issues surrounding heritage and cultural property, is to show the subjective nature of the definition of heritage. To the people of the Solomon Islands, their music is a tradition, a cultural practice from as far back as probably any one person can recall. They likely don’t term it heritage, as it exists as a practice in the present. To Zemp and UNESCO, it’s an aspect of their heritage, their cultural/religious/artistic/historical/tradition, and most importantly, a disappearing one that needs to be preserved. This seems to be UNESCO’s general position, that an inherent part of heritage is its ephemerality. This creates a state of continual crisis, no doubt sustained in an attempt to garner support out of fear of loss. The statistics on their website of the number of languages disappearing, and their methods of preservation, designating “human heritage treasures” to pass along knowledge, for example, all speak to a perpetual loss of heritage and UNESCO’s semi-effective attempts to catch the sand as it falls from the hourglass, efforts which could always use more support. I’ll leave aside the problems I find with this approach for now, to continue along with Feld.
Deep Forest, looking/listening to the same artifact as UNESCO and Zemp, don’t recognize heritage at all. In their view, the song is a product, cut off from the people and the heritage that produced it. It’s a means to reaching their artistic and commercial goals. Garbarek takes a similar view, though for him, the artifact and its connection to the indigenous people of the Solomon’s are little more than a set of legal hurdles. He feels that he should be able to navigate any issues of heritage plundering through money and the law. He literally paid his dues, and he should have no further responsibility in the matter.
What all of this is leading up to is my view that heritage does not exist other than as a construct employed in various ways to serve the people that have constructed it. Hafstein presents good support for this position in his discussion of the debate between individual and collective creation. Artists that have the awareness, and legal means, seek to obtain singular credit and recognition based on an outdated Enlightenment ideal. (This is increasingly true even among “primitive” artists, as they become more aware of the monetary opportunities.) Folklorists, groups like UNESCO, and certain tribal representatives seek recognition and recompense for group creation, based on collective creativity. Hafstein advocates a “communal origination through individual re-creation” (310) model, which I find quite sound theoretically. However, in the eyes of the law under a capitalist economic model, I don’t think this view will ever prevail in the main, a belief that Shand attests to in his coverage of Maori koru. While Shand presents incidents of mutual beneficiality as that between Moontide Swimwear and indigenous artists, these are undoubtedly the exception rather than the rule.
Though she approaches a rather different arena of heritage, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s definition still figures easily into my overall discussion. I would that I had her book in front of me to quote some of her definitions of heritage on 149. Alas, I do not. But I would like to recall a very interesting point made on 161, in which BKG illustrates how tourist industry members will negate culture to archaize it, then reverse the previously held negative view of the act since some distance has been gained from it, and then represent the aspect of culture as heritage. Here again we see heritage as a conscious construct driven by capitalism and used for personal ends, rather than an organic aspect of cultural awareness.
I run short on time, but I wish to raise what I find to be a highly problematic issue with regard to heritage preservation. While on the one hand I admire the efforts of an organization like UNESCO, on the other, I view their efforts as misplaced tamperings with the natural course of time and change. I can understand wanting to record aspects of heritage for posterity, but this desire to preserve them as well seems unnatural. I fear that through their efforts, they’re contaminating the cultures they try to preserve by imposing an outside value system on the culture’s products, influencing the way that a culture views its own practices and hampering a natural change over time, no matter how undesirable it may seem.
I don’t see today’s reading figuring too largely into my final project, except for BKG’s mention of the palimpsest in landmarking, (156) which I think will tie in nicely with Cardiff. The missing church at Cluny may also figure in as a type of cultural “phantom limb.”
Posted by Tyler Sinclair at 1:08 PM
Heritage production
What does it mean to own culture? The readings for this week posit different answers to this question, offering varying perspectives on how the question has been resolved within nation-states, supranational bodies, as well as local communities. Many of the articles reveal the difficulty of addressing culture from the legal realm of ownership and property rights. Indeed, the latter assume something is owned or patentable if it was invented, created, bought, or found by an individual or a set of individuals. However, as Hafstein argues, cultural expressions cannot simply be inserted into such a framework. Culture is created collectively and is based on continuity, not innovation (306). Hafstein brings up the concept of “intertextuality” as a useful way of understanding how culture is created and developed, mixing elements, quoting others, and thus, constantly regenerating (307). Thus, if cultural creativity is, as he argues, a social process that is nurtured by intertextual relations, how can it be placed within some sort of legal regime to protect it? Should it be placed within such a framework?
Steven Feld in his “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music” certainly seems to think so. He shows how the commodification of ethnicity through global soundscapes has developed into a form of exploitation based on unequal power relations. For Feld, cultural property rights are at the heart of the matter, even though Western property laws do not seem to be appropriate (162). Indeed, he too sees the downsides of a legal system that stresses individual authorship, over communal reproduction. However, he does not seem to be proposing a concrete solution. J. Sanford Rikoon, shifts the argument away from a legal recognition of communal cultural creativity, a property-oriented policy, to a people-centered one (326). He argues against placing culture within the realm of artifacts to be owned, protected, safeguarded. Indeed, protecting cultural rights is for Rikoon one more piece of the puzzle dominated by neoliberal ideology and economic globalization (328). Far from believing in Hafstein’s intertextual model of cultural quotations, Rikoon argues that “we must simultaneously recognize the dependencies and the polyphony as well as the power of place and community to produce knowledge and other forms of cultutal expression imprinted with very real local power and meaning” (331). Thus, protecting culture cannot be item-centered (as in the UNESCO lists, for example), but needs to take social context into consideration. Although he seems highly critical of the institution forms of heritage protection, the author shows that local versions of intellectual property rights need to be taken into consideration and even used as models (334).
Pluralism, difference, diversity seem to be the key themes that underlie all of the authors read for this week’s works. All seem to point out the fact that the mechanisms that have been designed (largely from above) precisely to protect, enrich and enforce diversity and cultural identities, are precisely having the opposite effect. Perhaps the most critical stance is that of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett in her article “World Heritage, Cultural Economics.”Here, she shows how the heritage industry, mostly represented by international organizations such as WIPO and UNESCO, have in fact displaced diversity and dispossessed peoples of their cultural uniqueness in favor of a human whole with open access (20, 21). Furthermore, they have driven culture outside the realm of the priceless and sacred, and into a world of economic valuation and valorization, cast as the new star of a model of economic development and tourist attractions (3), a true mark of modernity (19). They have created an “implicit cultural hierarchy” where not all cultural expressions make the cut and where the criteria is always exclusionary (8). Heritage is in many ways culture’s death. Indeed, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has shown that heritage is always produced. It is a strategy to give culture, habitus, habitat, a second life (1998:149). This is what the author means when she states that “heritage is a mode of metacultural production that produces something new, which though it has recourse to the past, is fundamentally different from it” (32). However, does a second life necessarily imply the death of the first? Is heritage always the result of a death? Is there such a thing as live “heritage” that is an active and generative component of culture? Could there be unforeseen consequences of heritage production that actually create something else?
Posted by Sandra Rozental at 1:03 PM
Heritage
The readings for this week were extremely extensive and contained a deluge of information, all of which was very new to me. The first thing I searched for was major issues and similarities in the texts, and there is one that stands out among the rest. That is this issue with heritage. It seems that there is such a fear and ignorance about heritage and culture that world conferences are held to figure out how to protect it. They try to discover ways to protect heritage, and in my opinion culture as well, from what I believe to be globalization. It seems that when anything leaves its original place (music, dance, art, etc.) and gets into the hands of mainstream society (through tourism and other venues) a sense of loss takes place. There is loss of culture, loss of meaning, loss of understanding, and in my opinion loss of appreciation.
There is even a need to give the term “heritage” a concrete definition. Barbara Kirsheblatt-Gimblett discusses in her essay UNESCO’s effort to define and protect world heritage. I believe this need and effort to protect and define would not be necessary if the “world” had more tolerance to music, dance, art, etc, of other cultures. I too, agree with the fact that there is a difference between celebrating diversity and tolerating diversity. To ask the world to celebrate something that (because of the world) needs to be protected is unrealistic. I think we have a better chance as a culture to push for toleration. For example, the Ashur and the Bamiyan Valley which were destroyed by the Taliban in March 2001. This occurred due to intolerance. I also believe there is a tension between tolerance and heritage when I examine issues such as the Confederate Flag being raised over the South Carolina statehouse. Granted, I don’t think that the Confederate Flag has anything to due with heritage. I believe it has more to do with ignorance masked as one’s heritage, but for people who do believe it is their heritage, how do we draw a line of tolerance for people who disapprove of the flag?
I would like to provide some other examples where I feel heritage is feared and misrepresented. In the article about the U.S. department’s warnings of retro, I see people like U.S. Secretary Anson Williams, who warns against a national retro crisis for fear that present or future events will bring a “retro-ironic appreciation.” The spread of the Koru/Maori from an object that has spiritual and cultural meaning to being just a design on an ashtray also shows how heritage is misrepresented when going from a cultural artifact to the mainstream.
In addition, I feel that intangible cultural heritage brings a threat that was not adequately discussed in the readings. In the reading on the convention for the safeguarding of the intangible cultural heritage, they discuss the purpose of the convention. They would like to build a mutual respect among communities, groups, and individuals by building an understanding and appreciation for intangible cultural heritage. They discuss the transmission of cultural heritage from generation to generation being constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, thus providing them with a sense of identity and continuity, which promotes respect for cultural diversity and human creativity. My question is what if this recreation gets into the hands of communities, groups, or individuals who do not understand or have an appreciation for intangible cultural heritage, or who simply want to profit from it? What is significant to one person might just be a paycheck for another, so how can we differentiate the two? How can we ensure that someone will not abuse another’s heritage through their recreation process? What if their environment or their understanding of history does not bring about a mutual respect for cultural diversity and creativity? What do we do then? Everyone has a very different understanding of various aspects of history, and if intangible heritage is the vital source of identity deeply rooted in history (especially for minorities and indigenous populations) how can we not believe that identity will be skewed?
I have always believe that world music had been viewed by the West as third world music, but I was not cognizant of the many instances where world musicians received less recognition and pay due to that stigma. I also feel that the problem of focus becomes a problem for heritage because heritage is a construct that I believe ceases to exist without people. When the focus of inter- and intragovernmental discussion on traditional knowledge and folklore becomes property focused instead of people centered, heritage to me no longer exists.
I am extremely confused concerning the politics of origin. How can one possibly determine the owner for an expression of folklore? A folksong, dress, pattern, dance, music, medicinal properties of a plant, etc. can always be traced to multiple cultures, from multiple time periods. There is much diversity among such expressions, but there is also always a connection, relationship, or interconnectedness among cultures. Due to colonization and globalization, how can anyone put a stamp on something and say, “This originally belonged to me?” It is a phenomenon I simply do not understand.
The reading on Destination Museum really helped me figure out some of the things I should be looking for when viewing the Slavery in New York Exhibit for my research project. I would not have known to examine time and space before doing this reading. The fact that the museum itself is an undrawn map of all the places from which the material has come, the floor plan, which determines where people walk and go, and essential what they see really illuminates some things for me. When I think about it now, there was a floor plan that told me exactly where to go and what to see next in the Slavery in New York exhibit. This is something I need to pay more close attention to for I believe it will elucidate some information.
Many of these conferences and documents are needed because of globalization and the need for authenticity, which requires the protection of a culture and heritage. Because of this I feel that the politics of representation sometimes defines heritage more so than culture, and this is a problem.
Posted by Siobhan Robinson at 12:59 PM
Documentation Doesn't Keep My Heritage Alive!
If heritage is defined as creating something new -- "a metacultural operation" (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett) and "a living entity" (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, UNESCO) then the policies to protect intangible heritage must be about more than documentation, but about supporting the whole ecosystem, the community in which culture is produced. If heritage is about living people who produce and transmit this knowledge, than these people need to be accorded full subjecthood and not be treated as objects (i.e. Feld's "A Sweet Lullaby for World Music") Developed countries need to engage in a soul-searching to root out deep-seated entitlement that allows them to unreflexively appropriate and commodify living heritage. Only if this occurs in there the potential for a positive public sphere. (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett) Otherwise, the "paradox of heritage" (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett) will end up perpetuating an unequal relationship between the producers of heritage and those who consume it. Moreover, the "humanity" to whom heritage belongs will only include those in developed countries who have the luxury to sample from the smorgosboard of difference. Legal protections must be put into place that protect communally produced products such as heritage so there will be legal recourse against the financial profitable appropriation Feld and Shand describe.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett in "Destination museum" provides an overview of how heritage functions. Importantly, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett feels that "heritage produces something new in the present that has resource to the past." (149) Marking something "heritage" does not fix a custom that is in danger of dying out, but rather it creates a new product and web of relationships; it is a metacultural process. Heritage is not about going back to the past, but rather it is about creating something new in the present. Heritage changes the relationship that producers have to their cultural products by labeling them cultures and starting a new web of dynamics of interactions: "By production, I do not mean that the result is not 'authentic' or that it is wholly invented. Rather, I wish to underscore that heritage is not lost and found, stolen and reclaimed. It is a mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past." (150)
One key aspects of heritage is that it "adds value to existing assets that have either ceased to be viable . . . or that never were economically production . . ." (150) Time travel, traveling to a world that no longer exists i.e. through a museum exhibition of artifacts or visiting an indigenous village, is a key trope of heritage. Heritage and tourism are symbiotic processes; heritage creates destinations and the tourism industry gets people to visit those destinations. In order to distinguish one destination from the next the difference, or salient features of a particular local must to successfully articulated. Although if one wants an escape vacation, a "get away" vacation of sand, sun, sea, sea, than once beach location can become interchangeable from the next.
Tourism imports tourists to buy and consume goods and services and export them back to your home location. Heritage produces something new through the way that heritage in marketed and packaged for tourist consumption; these systems of transfer often have a deleterious effect on the objects or way of life that is being displayed. These instruments for adding value are often ignored and the traditions being presented are what are recognized. Indeed, "a hallmark of heritage productions - perhaps their defining feature - is precisely the foreignness of the 'tradition' to it context of presentation. This estrangement produces an effect more Brechtian, more alienating, than mimetic and makes the interface a critical site for the production of meanings other than the 'heritage' message." (157)
As much as heritage is about remembering, it is also about forgetting. Indeed, through the conscious exhibiting of cultural practices choice are made about what one gets to see and the lens through which one views what one sees, the way events are narraritized. Heritage presentation provides a particular frame that leaves out more than it puts in and what is puts in it frames the interpretation for the viewer. For example, the 2002 Smithsonian Folklore Festival, "The Silk Road: Connecting Cultures, Creating Trust," made the traveler the hero and the market "became a model for free exchange and of connection, interdependence, and . . . trust." (12) The darker side the Silk Road -- invasions, wars, empires, vassal states etc -- was kept out of the frame.
Heritage, particularly in the display of objects in a museum, often displays objects separates from their ties to people and communities. Recent efforts, like at the Manawatu Museum in Palmerston North, New Zealand, have created an exhibition of objects that evokes the "living links to taonga that never died." (165)
Heritage productions are about virtuality, whether or not there are actualities, which increase the importance of experience. In the absence of actualities, or complete actualities (in the case of the phantom Abbey Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul), experience becomes the barometer with which one measures how satisfying the touristic experience was.
Expanding upon the notion of heritage as "produc[ing] something new in the present that has resource to the past." (149) articulated in "Destination museum," in "World Heritage and Cultural Economics," Kirshenblatt-Gimblett describes how "heritage is created through metacultural operations that extend museological values and methods . . . to living persons, their knowledge, practices, artifacts, social worlds, and life spaces." (1) What was habitus becomes heritage, changing the relationships that cultural producers have to their "cultural assets." (1) These is a fundamental paradox and asymmetry; those who produce cultural assets are defined by their "diversity," while those assets come to belong to all of "humanity." This asymmetry is related to the difference between cultural diversity and cultural relativity, which translates into the difference between celebrating diversity and tolerating difference. As Kirshenblatt-Gimblett states: "The tension between diversity and relativity - and their relationship to universal human rights - informs my analysis of the role of world heritage in defining a global cultural commons and global public sphere, consistent with UNESCO's twin goals of peace and prosperity." (2) "World heritage offers a way to make culture part of the solution," (2) by helping to create prosperity that can allow for peace. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett sees heritage as having the potential to create a global public sphere: "The conversion of habitus into heritage and heritage into cultural assets, cultural capital, and cultural good, a process that is integral to concepts of public domain, public goods, fair use, and global cultural commons, can engender the kind of public debate associated with a public sphere." (31)
As outlined in UNESCO's 2003 document from "The Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage" and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's "World Heritage and Cultural Economics," UNESCO has a particular definition of heritage and policy initiates which stem from that definition. UNESCO created the category of intangible heritage as a place to recognize cultural productions of developing countries whose heritage did not fall under the categories of tangible or natural heritage. Intangible heritage now refers not only to the things produced, but also to the people who produced them. These has been an acknowledgement of how unlike the archive, knowledge in the repertoire is passed down through embodied knowledge; practitioners are the key transmitters of this cultural knowledge. (Diana Taylor) Instead of simply documenting traditions, UNESCO is now trying to help to sustain living, and often threatened, traditions. Intangible heritage is alive and therefore "the task . . . is to sustain the whole system as a living entity and not just to collect 'intangible artifacts.'" UNESCO originally tried to protect intangible heritage using legal concepts such as copyright and intellectual property. That endeavor failed because these laws are predicated on the notion of an individual producer, while intangible heritage was understood as a communal creation that exists in a variety of different forms. UNESCO shifted its focus from legal protection to preservation measures.
In keeping with this shift of conceptualizing intangible heritage as a living system, rather than simply documenting cultural forms, UNESCO defines intangible heritage using a "holistic and conceptual approach," identifying it in the 2001 document as "All forms of traditional and popular or folk culture, i.e. collective works originating in a given community and based on tradition." (5) UNESCO also provides a definition of intangible heritage that is more of an inventory: "Its forms are among others, language, literature, music, dance, games, mythology, rituals, customs, handicrafts, architecture and other arts," referencing earlier efforts to define, categorize and record intangible heritage.
Because UNESCO understands intangible heritage as "works originating in a given community" -- the local and situated nature of intangible heritage -- it encourages state actors to safeguard intangible heritage within its national boundaries (6) Moreover, UNESCO sees its role as providing leadership and guidance to international, state and local actors. UNESCO makes recommendations and raises awareness. UNESCO's list of intangible heritage is an example of a particular instrument meant to "promote awareness, dialogue, and respect," (6) stemming out of UNESCO recognition that intangible heritage is important because "these processes provide living communities with a sense of continuity with previous generations and are important to cultural identity, as well as to the safeguarding of cultural diversity and creativity of humanity." (5)
The 2002 Smithsonian Folklore Festival, "The Silk Road: Connecting Cultures, Creating Trust," provided a slightly different notion of heritage and therefore a different set of practices. The Folklore Festival was "[c]onceived as 'a living exhibition'" (11). The organizers defined heritage as a living, embodied practice. The organizers also de-emphasized national boundaries and emphasized interconnectedness and free exchange. To that end, the layout of the festival conveyed the silk route itself and cultural exchange. (12) Interestingly, on the homepage of The Silk Road website, there is a picture of people walking through the festival. There are hanging mats?, curtains?, seemingly from an exhibition on the upper part of the picture. The United States capital building is imposing and stable in the background, as if to say: "National boundaries overall might be minimized, but let's not forget which nation has organized this nexus of cultures." The website is set up as virtual time and space travel; not only can you click on links to go to any of the stops on the Silk Road, but you are also traveling back in time to when the Silk Road was a major trade root! The website strives to be experiential, to evoke experience rather than simply educate.
On the website there is a link for fashion where there is a summary of all the designers from various countries along the Silk Road who designed clothes and then pictures of models wearing their designs. The appropriation of cultural forms and lack of intellectual property law raises issues addressed in Feld's "A Sweet Lullaby for World Music" and "Scenes from a Colonial Catwalk: Cultural Appropriation and Intellectual Property Rights, and Fashion" and that WIPO has attempted to address through modification to intellectual property law.
Hafstein in "The Politics of Origin," articulates what is at stake in identifying intangible heritage/folklore as the production of an individual producer or a collective creation. Intellectual property and copyright law is designed to protect the individual producer of a unique, new product. In contrast, folklore is often understood as being communally created and therefore not under the protection of intellectual property law. WIPO has been meeting both to determine whether folklore could be reconceptualized as produced by individuals and hence covered under current intellectual property laws or whether new protections need to be implement to cover community creations such as folklore. Because heritage is conceived as communal, existing as part of a ecosystem that is passed down through time, there is a need to set up protections that run counter to the modernist privileging of the "genius" and "inventor." There is a need for protections that value the "ab-original." Perhaps moreover, there is a need to reconceptualize the whole notion of originality -- recognizing that all things participate in mimesis and the complex interplay of intertextuality.
Feld's "A Sweet Lullaby for World Music" and Shand's "Scenes from a Colonial Catwalk Cultural Appropriation and Intellectual Property Rights," provide eye-opening examples of the way that when heritage circulates it becomes divorced from its place of origin. Also, how the communities who produced that heritage receive no monetary benefit, while cultural producers in developed countries use intellectual property laws to financially profit. The paradoxical relationship Kirshenblatt-Gimblett articulated in "World Heritage and Cultural Economics" -- where those who produce cultural assets are defined by their "diversity," while those assets come to belong to all of "humanity" -- is put into sharp relief. These examples highlight the need for intellectual property laws that protect heritage and also the resistance of artists in developed countries to fully conceptualize what is the "right" amount of commendation to give to people whose heritage was appropriated. As Feld rhetorically asks: "How else could one read Deep Forrest and Jan Garbarek presenting themselves as the victims in a history where they are guaranteed vastly disproportionate gain to their muses?" (167)
In terms of how these reading could apply to my project, the ideas of cultural diversity and cultural relativity, i.e. celebrating diversity and tolerating difference, I think could be very helpful. What are the limits of relativity and tolerance? Walking around Hasidic Williamsburg, I have been struck by the number of groups living in such close proximity while in (seemingly) self-contained, non-mixing communities. Going from North to South along the East River, there is the Polish neighborhood of Greenpoint, the Hipster neighborhood right near the Bedford L train stop, the Hispanic neighborhood, and the Hasidic Jewish neighborhood. In addition, I recently read Bharucha's The Politics of Cultural Practice where he discuses intra and inter cultural theater as opposed to multicultural theater. With the prefix intra- he sees a space for difference to exist, without the homogenizing effects of state-sponsored, "let's all hold hands," multiculturalism. How does the relationship between the Hasidic population and other population in Williamsburg compare to the relationship between the large Muslim population in Holland and other Dutch populations? When can difference be tolerated and when does it destabilize the nation state? Or conflict with universal notions of human rights? (i.e female circumcision)
Posted by Sarah Zoogman at 12:53 PM
Power and Preservation
This week’s readings on heritage move us beyond the individual “tourist experience,” and expand the realm of inquiry to encompass the politics of preservation as they are enacted on a global scale. Ultimately, these selections wrestle with questions of power: Considering the violent history of international trade and cultural exploitation, how can transnational bodies of governance and law safeguard that which was lost to processes of globalization without performing the very racist valuations of life that made “progress” possible in the first place? Anchoring neutral terms like heritage, folklore, diversity, and humanity are time-tested dichotomies of power distribution: colonized/colonizer, rest/The West, third/first worlds. In regards to tourist practices these readings illuminate those aspects that cultural displays, panoramas, “world music” and the Silk Roads projects do not: the dimensions of economic exploitation, market desire, and guilt that fuel such global projects.
Though each piece conceptualizes and uses the term heritage slightly differently, those with a theoretical bent successfully de-naturalize and de-neutralize the term. BKG’s chapter in Destination Culture noted that heritage projects effectively give “outmoded” life-worlds a second life (born again, as it were). Heritage is no longer associated with the past – it is conceived as a term that points to a creative reconstruction occurring squarely in the contemporary moment. The forces exhibiting and displaying alternate cultural modes are inherently productive -- i.e., heritage produces “places” from “spaces” and configures a range of somatic, intellectual, and collective visitor experiences. Simultaneously, heritage can be destructive by sanctioning “zones of repudiation” out of that which is “left behind.” The past – in its actuality – is not (and can never be) wholly reconstituted. What is displayed is an idea/ideal of the past, romantic in its conception, sanitized in its reconstruction. These ideas were helpful in thinking through the building of the Ground Zero memorial and the soundwalk memorial – in both instances, a past moment of violence is remembered and reconstituted using highly contemporary and highly advanced technologies. September 11th is being recast as a sacred, national day of remembrance – heritage-building is slowly occurring on and around this space.
Heritage, then, functions in a particular way. BKG’s essay on world heritage expands on this idea and shows how this term functions on a global scale. Protecting the “intangible cultural heritage of humanity” notes the document from the UNESCO convention, is a “universal will and common concern.” Such good-intentioned and sweeping declarations give theorists pause, and rightly so. As BKG notes, world heritage (like world music) is posited as an antidote to the homogenizing effects of globalization. Nonetheless, it is a global project made possible by planetary networks and, by setting universal value standards, may actually contribute to homogenizing processes. Again, heritage-preservation both creates and destroys. A look at the list of those “intangibles” to be preserved highlights the arbitrariness of such a process – how can one justifiably value some life worlds over others? At the same time, how can institutions of power “stand by” while these forms slip away into the cemetery of the past? A complicated question indeed, one that gets at the heart of how global justice is to be conceived.
Furthermore, it seems that “humanity” (in the UNESCO docs) operates as a code word for “the West” while “diversity” and “culture” are code words for “the other.” That is, it feels as if the theoretical underpinnings of enlightenment-era political liberalism implicitly fuel such a project. Humanity owns and protects diversity, just as the agent of political liberalism owns and possesses life, liberty and property. The human with the “right” in universal human rights law has to be a distinctive citizen of a nation (in order to be protected by the law). Now, in safeguarding intangible heritage, rights to life are born from cultural (rather than national) distinctions. And, as BKG asks towards the end of the essay, what happens to cultural diversity when it belongs to humanity? Heritage, the great global diplomat, may be undoing distinction by positing universal standards of “what is best” for humanity to remember, inherit, and incorporate.
Issues of safeguarding diversity through recourse to global governing bodies of law arise in the Haftein, Feld, and Shand pieces. All authors operate under the assumption that legislation is needed to protect community rights to their creative expressions. At the heart of these discussions is, as Feld states, a barrage “uneven rewards, unsettling representations, and complexly entangled desires that lie underneath the commercial rhetoric of global connection, that is, the rhetoric of ‘free’ flow and ‘greater’ access.” The same, it seems, can be said for tourism. Again, the question becomes, how can “we” dignify and retain diversity in an era of contact, erosion, change, and travel? Constructing value-heavy dichotomies between the traditional, folkloric reproduction and the contemporary, original innovation does not help.
Music, healing, fashion, and design – “culture” as it were – are all flowing freely through new global channels (e.g., the internet); yet, this metaphor of the “free market” always obscures the realities of drastic inequality. As Feld notes, “the existence and success of world music returns to one of globalization's basic economic clichés: the drive for more and more markets and market niches.” Replace the category “world music” with “tourism” and we are back to looking squarely at the industry of culture. Ultimately, these readings helped me think through the ways that international sight-seeing, pilgrimage, and tourism are part of a changing global landscape. In conceptualizing my own project, it will be necessary to take into account these global flows and governing institutions, thereby connecting the individual touristic experience to questions of politics and the power of heritage-building.
Posted by Brynn Noelle Saito at 12:14 PM
Blowing my Nose in Kleenex Lotion Tissues is Endangered Intangible Cultural Heritage Because I Can't Afford to Buy Them Anymore.
According to the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, “intangible cultural heritage” includes practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, and skills. The convention also acknowledges that “intangible cultural heritage” is constantly recreated by “communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history” (2). It manifests itself in oral traditions (including language), performing arts, social practices, rituals and festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe, and traditional craftsmanship (Article 2).
This definition is so broad that it seems as if “intangible cultural heritage” is the very basis of human existence. It might as well be called the body of knowledge held by human beings, which continuously constructs and reconstructs peoples’ sense of identity through various social interactions. In order to reasonably negotiate a definition that applies to almost all behavior, an additional requirement must be added. In order to be added to the list, the behavior must be in danger of extinction.
UNESCO has currently proclaimed 47 "Masterpieces of the Oral and
Intangible Heritage of Humanity" from all regions of the world (http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID=19326&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
). Even though Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett maintains that heritage is “a mode of metacultural production that produces something new, which, though it has recourse to the past, is fundamentally different from it” (32). Despite the possible negative results that may occur by being included in the list of "Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity,” many parties seek entry into the list. On November 21-24, the International Jury Meeting for the Third Proclamation will occur in Paris. Originally, the meeting was scheduled for July. However, it had to be moved back because 70 groups are filing for inclusion in the list.
In order to apply for inclusion, one needs to fill out the UNESCO form, present a 2-hour VHS tape, and present a 10-minute film, of professional quality, to be shown during the final assembly. The 10-minute tape must describe the subject, show how it is of exceptional value, show how it is in danger of extinction, and present a plan of action. Applicants are encouraged to look at the website presenting the 47 proclaimed masterpieces to get a more precise idea of
the type of oral and intangible heritage which retained the Jury's attention at the first two. However, the website does little to substantiate the requirement of “danger of extinction.” 
When looking under the heading “risk of disappearance” for Japan’s Ningyo Johruri Bunraku Puppet Theatre, it reads, “it faces no serious threat nowadays” http://www.unesco.org/culture/intangible-heritage/masterpiece.php?id=68&lg=en
). That is because in 1955, the Japanese government declared Bunraku “Important Intangible Cultural Property” and spent a lot of money building and subsidizing a Bunraku theatre in Osaka. (Incidentally, the Japanese government is now repeating this procedure by building a theatre for the native dances of Okinawa.) Clearly, there is a large discrepancy between Bunraku and groups like The Royal Ballet of Cambodia, which was almost completely erased during the Khmer Rouge rule.
Once the extinction rule is taken out of play in the UNESCO definition of “Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity” almost anything, including the white lie, can be legitimately submitted to the list. In fact, when looking at the phrase Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity,” there is no reason to automatically assume the idea of endangerment. Of the upcoming 70 applicants, how will UNESCO be able to legitimately turn down any party? It might fall strictly to presentation savvy.
Taken at a Shinto Shrine, on the top of a hill in Kurashiki, Japan. This is a picture of Kyogen, which is the more comedic bent of Nohgaku (one of the first Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity). Kyogen is played before or in-between Noh pieces.
Picture
2: Traditional dance of Cambodia, performed for tourists in a restaurant in Siem
Reap. If I remember correctly, this
particular dance is drawn from fishing and gathering methods.
In 1996 Summer Olympic in Atlanta, USA, prestigious Germany music group Enigma’s song, Return to Innocence, was selected as the theme song of 1996 Olympic. By the media power followed by Olympic, the song was widely known in the world as another legendary accomplishment created by Enigma. However, no one was as shocked as Taiwanese. The opening of the song was the voice from Taiwan for sure. His name is Difang, an elder aboriginal singer from Taiwan’s Ami Tribe, and the name of the chant was Elder’s Drinking Song, the traditional tune of the tribe.