6533b85dfe1ef96bd12bde0c

RESEARCH PRODUCT

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

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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 transformative, internationalist notion of world heritage, this intangible perception of cultural heritage is embraced by the European Community and promoted on a global scale by the Paris headquarters of the 1946 founded UNESCO. And yet, at the same time, it neglects much of the deep-rooted symbolic identifications with Europe’s dissonant pasts and identity crusades, and fosters the assumption of an almost touristic kind of bottom-up heritagization as a more democratic road to Europeanization. Altogether, such contradictory statements on what is analysed as an "intangible heritage turn", thus ask for a critical observation in the context of the current authoritarian revolt and the related revival of Identitarian discourses in large parts of Europe, both from the Left and from the Right (in defense of, respectively, minority cultures and national cultures). Sketching the past and current state of affairs in intangible heritage policy, and using examples from the Dutch postcolonial case of Black Pete to the Russian-Ukrainian folklore war on Kolobok, it is argued how by highlighting cultural diversity, the Intangible Heritage Convention takes the risk of becoming a legitimizing instrument for groups and communities claiming exclusive rights and values in competition with others. The protection of cultural traditions and expressions might then lead to the result that what is safeguarded as intangible heritage may actually be a community’s nostalgic brand identity, whereas such community values might at the same time be framed by populist governments and movements as being threatened by precisely the kind of cultural diversity, or the “creolization of the world”,3 which the Convention should help to support.