Abstract
For centuries, cultural-heritage protection systems have been based on written inventories that functioned as tools with which to record heritage objects. Yet the new category of “intangible cultural heritage,” created by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in its 2003 Convention, is an exception within such a registration and classification framework. The Convention, which includes in this category all living cultural practices, introduces the need to build a new system of protection based on a dynamic and inclusive principle that rejects any kind of hierarchy or fossilization. The implementation of this democratic ideal of safeguarding raises numerous paradoxes. Is it really possible to build a protection system with no record? This chapter focuses on the role that digital media can play in the resolution of this paradoxes.
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Notes
- 1.
“World Heritage,” UNESCO, accessed September 15, 2017, http://whc.unesco.org/en/about/
- 2.
The choice of such a denomination is due principally to the need to avoid the word “folklore,” which in the European context and especially in France would have a racist meaning (following the use of the term during the war).
- 3.
The elements were then divided into 12 categories (compared with the five official categories of the Convention), which also included practices such as games and culinary traditions.
- 4.
Before passing to the fourth section, it is important to recognize the difficulties that these projects have encountered and are still encountering in soliciting the participation of community members. In particular, cultural heritage managers have to cope with the digital divide related to age, lack of computer skills or simply to a reluctance towards digital media. However, this question is irrelevant to the purpose of this chapter, which questions the theoretical relationship between intangible heritage and documents without going into the problems of a practical implementation.
- 5.
We do not reject the interest of the concept of digital trace, which in other contexts we have used extensively (Severo and Romele 2015). Yet, in this context, the absence or weakness of intentionality of traces makes them irrelevant for the construction of inventories where recognition by the community constitutes a determining element for safeguarding.
- 6.
A previous and shorter version of the thesis contained in this book is available in English in Ferraris (2014).
- 7.
Jacques Deridda (1990) in particular investigates the difference between force of law and justice: a distinction that we can recognize implicitly in the opposition drawn by Ferraris between strong and weak document.
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This work was supported by the Labex Les passés dans le présent (Investissements d’avenir, réf. ANR-11-LABX-0026-01).
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Severo, M. (2018). Safeguarding Without a Record? The Digital Inventories of Intangible Cultural Heritage. In: Romele, A., Terrone, E. (eds) Towards a Philosophy of Digital Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75759-9_9
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