Europe’s Peat Fire: Intangible Heritage and the Crusades for Identity

Dissonances of ethnic nationalism have in Western cultural policy long been concealed by the universalist discourses of the international treaties on material heritage protection, as framed by the expansive heritage conservation apparatuses of the European nation states. Originally inspired by the 19th century romantic spirit of conservation, they became in the 20th century part of the modern, state-apparatus. Yet parallel with the European enlargements and new kinds of memory debates on the Holocaust and postcolonialism, these authorized heritage regimes have received more and more competition from a transnational counter-discourse on intangible cultural heritage. Like the earlier transfor…