It is a daunting task to review any edited volume, particularly one that already features
a substantial introduction (by co-editor Michael Dylan Foster) and three critical
commentaries (by Anthony Seeger, Valdimar Tr. Hafstein, and Dorothy Noyes) – indeed, the
six case studies make up only two-thirds of the pages. Born from a 2012 session at the
American Folklore Society, the collection previously appeared as a special issue of
As the title suggests, the six case studies seek to examine how this global effort is instantiated, perceived, and experienced at the local level, in communities in India (Leah Lowthorp), Republic of Korea (Kyoim Yun), Malawi (co-editor Lisa Gilman), Japan (Foster), Macedonia (Carol Silverman), and China (Ziying You). Wending its way through each of these rich ethnographic studies is the chimaera of UNESCO, a semi-mythical beast composed of diverse parts and imagined differently by each of its local observers. It is important, then, to emphasize the disjunction between this imagined “UNESCO” (hereafter, in quotation marks) and any real intergovernmental organization that might be physically headquartered in Paris’s 7th arrondissement (hereafter, UNESCO without quotes).
In his introduction, co-editor Foster explains that “each one of the case studies in this work concerns a local ICH element that either has been recognized by, nominated for, or is being discussed in terms of the 2003 Convention” (8). The last alternative is expansive enough to cover almost anything, but it is imperative to note that of the six case studies, only two in fact concern elements nominated for inscription on either of the two lists established by the 2003 Convention (Yun’s Korean example and Foster’s Japanese case). Three studies (those of Lowthorp, Gilman, and Silverman) concern elements that were nominated, successfully or not, as Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, an experimental program that ended in 2006 when the Convention entered into force, and the sixth study concerns a domestic listing system established by the Chinese government. Just as a historian would not confuse decisions made or actions undertaken by the Continental Congresses before 1789 with those made later by the Congress of the United States under the Constitution (or confuse acts of Congress and those of a state legislature), it is a mistake to ignore the profound differences between the Masterpieces program and the Convention that followed—one might even say their mutual incompatibility in many regards.
Even a cumbersome bureaucracy like UNESCO is capable of learning from its missteps, and it is unfortunate that the essays do not carefully enough distinguish processes that may have a superficial resemblance, but begin from very different premises. The criteria and guidelines for the Masterpieces program remained bound in antiquated notions of “outstanding value,” “distinction,” “excellence,” “genius,” uniqueness, and exemplarity, all to be determined by a panel of external experts, somehow magically apprehending the realities on the ground from a nomination file compiled and submitted by a UNESCO Member State. The 2003 Convention, by contrast, repudiates the possibility that the practices and expressions of a community or group can be subjected to any such external valuation. Under the terms of the Convention—as Foster correctly notes in his introduction—it is only the communities, groups, or individuals concerned who can recognize particular practices and expressions as constituting their ICH, and they alone can determine its value. No outsider has the prerogative or even the possibility to recognize something as someone else’s ICH.
It is thus anathema to the Convention to speak of “UNESCO recognition” or “international recognition” of an element as the aim or the effect of inscription on either of the Convention’s lists (or even of earlier proclamation as a Masterpiece; the term had largely disappeared from UNESCO usage in this sense by the late 1990s). Unfortunately, not one of the authors uses “recognition” with the meaning assigned to it by the Convention (except when Foster is quoting the Convention’s text). Several speak of recognition by a national government (again, contrary to the Convention’s usage) and there are occasional references to “societal recognition” of an element or a general recognition of the importance of ICH, but overwhelmingly the tendency is to refer to recognition as something conferred by UNESCO from on high. Thus Yun’s title refers to “UNESCO recognition,” an idea that resurfaces more than 15 times within her chapter; Foster’s case study has 14 such references, Noyes’s 9, Hafstein’s 8 (not counting quotations from the other authors), and Lowthorp’s more than 30.
This fascination with “UNESCO recognition” reflects and amplifies the regrettable tendency of international researchers (these authors included) to reduce the Convention to a machine for listing, and further to reduce the Convention’s two lists to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. This not only ignores the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding (mentioned in a single footnote by Hafstein) but loses sight completely of the Convention’s primary focus on the obligations of countries that have ratified the Convention (173 at the time of this writing) to safeguard all of the ICH present in their territories. Surely there is more going on “on the ground” in most countries than nominations, inscriptions, and consequences (intended or unintended) of inscriptions, and the field of ICH now urgently requires greater scholarly attention to the broader implementation of the Convention. This is all the more important inasmuch as the Convention has no enforcement mechanism, and its States Parties can only be held accountable for their action or inaction by civil society, including scholars. Moreover, there seems to be a certain degree of futility about scholars pointing to the negative (indeed, in many cases, disastrous) consequences of listing and inscription, given that these were all well predicted beforehand, borne out by the early experience of the Masterpieces program, yet nevertheless retained by UNESCO’s Member States when adopting the 2003 Convention. If the oracles were so roundly ignored despite their prescience, whom are further jeremiads likely to convince?
Finally, if we have no reason to doubt the quality and perspicacity of the researchers’ fieldwork or the accuracy of their reports of how “UNESCO” is perceived by locals on the ground, the question arises whether that is enough. Do scholars not also have an obligation to exercise the same diligence to try to understand what UNESCO itself is and does, as a referent against which those local perceptions can be compared? Despite Seeger’s valiant attempt to make sense, to outsiders, of the complex intergovernmental organization that is UNESCO, one has the sense that his essay may not have been made available to the other contributors in a timely enough manner that they could take it fully into account in their own contributions. Not infrequently, UNESCO is held accountable for actions entirely within the purview of national authorities, undertaken by their National Commissions for UNESCO, by ministry staff, or by local officials. That people on the ground identify these actions without differentiation as “UNESCO” interventions is an important ethnographic observation, but only if the researcher also takes care to determine (and to inform readers) whether or not they fall within the responsibility of the real UNESCO.
Notwithstanding these criticisms, this volume constitutes an important resource for those who would like to study—and especially to teach—how the concept of “intangible cultural heritage” has been deployed internationally in the twenty-first century. May it encourage these authors, and others, to return to the field but to look away from listing and instead to the far more interesting and important work of safeguarding.
Works Cited
Kapchan, Deborah, ed. 2014.
UNESCO. Website of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. www.unesco.org/culture/ich. Accessed May 6, 2017.
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[Review length: 1400 words • Review posted on May 10, 2017]