Ethnologia Europaea

Narrated Sámi Sieidis

This article analyses property relations in cultural expression in the ambivalent process of heritage production, and considers the implementation of intangible heritage by communities and individuals in the framework of cultural policy making. Ownership reflects an entanglement of interests, grounded in the established social and political domains. There appear moments that sustain or contest agency in property ownership, while modern cultural politics may dictate conflicts between individual or communal property rights in the context of claiming significance to heritage.My discussion of the predicaments of collective or individual ownership, contested restitution or celebration observable in the policies of intangible cultural heritage is based on the experience of the Setocommunity in Estonia.

Current intergovernmental initiatives to protect traditional culture rely on a problematic conception of “community” as its creator/owner. Accounts of distributed invention in open-source software suggest that the network model provides a better description of folk process. But the celebrated “flexible network” of contemporary collective creativity is historically specific. Using the example of festival in Catalonia, I show that those forms we call traditional emerge from inflexible networks shaped by economic scarcity, political constraint, and an abundance of time: “hardscrabble academies.” As traditions move into liberal capitalist settings, they undergo certain characteristic transformations, experiencing contradictory pressures towards dispersal and proliferation, onthe one hand, and codification under particular regimes of circulation, on the other.

This contribution is a stab at unpacking the discursive register restitution, return and repatriation. Initially, I map the genealogies of these terms, suggesting that an adequate conceptualization rests on the elementary forms of reciprocity and recognition. I contend that the discursive register can both be understood within neo-Maussian exchange theory as a set of transactional orders resting on sliding scales of obligation and within postcolonial theory hinging on the concept of recognition. I further argue that repatriation claims cannot be conceived independently from the regimes of recognition they address, which both enable and silence claims. I conclude by suggesting that the intersection of reciprocity and recognition might illuminate the institution of cultural property asa phenomenon of postcolonial potlatching.

The concept of cultural property is often discussed in the sphere of international policy with a critical dimension of neglected rights of local actors. This paper deals with local strategies of labelling a tradition as cultural property of a specific community by reconstructing the historical dimension of a local property regime. Cultural property is thus analysed as a cultural technique at its own right that produces powerful local hierarchies and that refers to both material and symbolic dimensions. The carnival of Binche with its long history of metacultural operations shows how tradition is used as a local resource in are flexive society and how local actors integrate new legal instruments into their understanding and management of a traditional practice.1

In this paper I compare the theory and the practice of heritage highlighting the gap which separates ideas underpinning the intangible cultural heritage normative definition (via the text of the Unesco Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage) and in the broad discourse of the institution (the “esprit de laconvention”) from concrete application of heritage policies to “traditional culture” made by local actors. I focus on how the idea of “property” is dealt with in both contexts and consider the role that the spatial location in a territory plays in this regard. The establishment of a system of “geographical indicators” for handcrafts, the heritagization and monumentalization of a special kind of clay whistle in southern Italy is taken as an example to demonstrate how local heritage policies address issues of property – territory and intangible heritage.