Project

Discipline

folk medecine; culture; UNESCO; story-telling; multimedia; theater; museums; hip hop; know-how; folklore; heritage

Lead
Lay summary
This application builds directly on Sinergia project n° 100017_137773, “Intangible Cultural Heritage: the Midas Touch?”, which has benefited from SNF funding for three years. Our overall goal is to analyze the processes and effects of the implementation of the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (“ICH”) in Switzerland. Switzerland ratified this Convention in July of 2008, obliging the federal administration to create an inventory of Swiss ICH. As of this writing, this procedure has been partially completed: the cantons have submitted their inventories to the Federal Office of Culture (“FOC”), which has selected 167 items to figure on a national list. A third step is expected this fall when the Federal Counsel will identify a much smaller number of these for submission to UNESCO. Over the past three years, we have pursued our research goal as planned through six sub-projects, each focusing on a specific aspect of ICH.  Sub-project A is an ethnography of the administration of the ICH Convention. We follow the choices that federal and cantonal administrators are confronted with, their interactions with other public agencies and private actors, and the stakes raised by ICH at the international level. Sub-project B studies the revival of story-telling in local dialect, a practice that fits awkwardly within the paradigm for ICH established by UNESCO. This study includes a dialectological aspect, but also looks at the new actors promoting Swiss-French dialects in the cantons of Wallis and Jura, and the "neo-patoisants" who have mobilized to rescue these vanishing languages. Sub-project C set out to investigate forms of cultural expression that were excluded from the national list, despite various attemps to promote them: the practice of hip-hop and theater with migrant populations in the city of Basel. This sub-project allows us to examine the logics of inclusion and exclusion that are a central issue in our research design.  By way of contrast, sub-projects D and E focus on two cultural practices that were included in the national lists of Swiss ICH: knowledge of herbal medicine and Swiss watch-making know-how. These two examples allow us to see how cultural practices are itemized, processed and reshaped by their heritigization, and who stands to gain or to lose from such procedures. Finally, sub-project F consists in a triology of museum exhibits at the Neuchâtel Museum of Ethnography ("Bruit", Sept. 2011-June 2012; "Off Screen", Nov. 2012-August 2013; "Secrets" Feb. 2014-Nov.2014). These exhibits allow us to step back and reflect materially on the ICH paradigm and its relation to the discipline. They also allow us to focus data collection on the effects of the selection procedure, its reception by the different audiences concerned and the debates about national identity and the place of tradition that this procedure inevitably provokes.

Direct link to Lay Summary

Last update: 21.02.2013

Active participation

Self-organised

Active participation

Communication	Title	Media	Place	Year

Number	Title	Start	Funding scheme

SummaryThis application builds directly on Sinergia project n° CRSI11_127570, “Intangible Cultural Heritage: the Midas Touch?” (hereinafter “Midas (I)”), which has benefited from funding for three years, with a scheduled completion date of September 30, 2012. Our overall goal is to analyze the processes and effects of the implementation of the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (“ICH”) in Switzerland. Switzerland ratified this Convention in July of 2008, obliging the federal administration to create an inventory of Swiss ICH. As of this writing, this procedure has been partially completed: the cantons have submitted their inventories to the Federal Office of Culture (“FOC”), which has selected 167 items to figure on a national list. A third step is expected this summer when the Federal Counsel will identify a much smaller number of these for submission to UNESCO, with the aim of placing one or two on the “Representative List of the ICH of Humanity” at the Intergovernmental Committee meeting in Grenada in November of 2012. Over the past two years, we have pursued our research goal as planned through six sub-projects, each focusing on a specific aspect of ICH (see Annex 1 for the “Research Plan” for Midas I). With hindsight, it appears that our design of the sub-projects was felicitous. The national inventory includes a number of elements grouped around traditional medicinal practices and watchmaking, the subjects of sub-projects D and E. As foreseen, others elements do not appear on the national list, despite the existence of “bearers of culture” ready to promote them, as with the storytellers analyzed in sub-project B. The case of hip-hop (sub-project C) is particularly interesting as it figured prominently in the images that the FOC initially circulated on its website, but did not end up on its list. Likewise, the absence of migrant theater (sub-project C) speaks worlds about the logics of inclusion and exclusion that are a central issue in our research design. Based on data collected on the implementation of the first stages of the federal program, we can now focus our data collection on the effects of the selection procedure, its reception by the different audiences concerned and the debates about national identity and the place of tradition that this procedure will inevitably provoke. With “Intangible Cultural Heritage in Switzerland: Whispered Words” (“Midas II”), we are requesting funding for an additional eighteen-month period running from October 1, 2012 to March 31, 2014. This request is principally motivated by the following unforeseen developments in the field, listed in order of importance: 1.With respect to our object of study: the federal pilot project implementing the UNESCO Convention will take one year longer than initially planned, and will only be completed in November of 2012. This has direct implications for data collection for sub-projects A, B, C, D and E.2.With respect to the political context in which our study takes place: key stakeholders are beginning to question the workings and legitimacy of the UNESCO ICH paradigm at the international level, with direct repercussions on Switzerland’s participation in this process over the next two years, and important implications for the empirical and theoretical aspects of all of our sub-projects.3.With respect to our theoretical framework: the theoretical framework for our study has been recently consolidated by the creation of the international Association for Critical Heritage Studies (inaugural conference in Göteborg, Sweden, in June of 2012). In many ways, our research design anticipated this new paradigm. The Midas team is thus positioned to contribute to an important degree to this emerging international arena, and to lay the groundwork for establishing heritage studies as a recognized field of study in Switzerland.Continuation of funding will allow the four doctoral candidates, three post-doctoral candidates and three scientific collaborators engaged in this project to continue working as a team to finish the data collection necessary for their empirical work, and to integrate these new political and theoretical developments into their scientific output.