Putting Intangible Heritage in its Place(s): Proposals for Policy

Abstract

The regrettable split between tangible and intangible heritage specializations should be brought to an end. Just as it is clear that many (tangible) places owe their importance to intangible values, it is also clear that many aspects of intangible heritage are grounded in specific places and cannot survive without them. Yet UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage shows little interest in places, and national and local conservation policies are generally ineffective at safeguarding the intangible values of places. There is an urgent need for policies that do so. To develop them, heritage experts will need to look beyond the kinds of cultural manifestations favored by tourism and focus instead on ordinary, everyday places. Paying attention to the narratives expressed through people’s customs, stories, and memories can give conservationists invaluable insight into the psychological bonds that people form with these places and that, with time, come to define their heritage values. Practitioners can adapt research methods from anthropology, sociology, geography, and environment-behavior studies to analyze people’s place-relationships and organize their apparently limitless subjectivity into coherent patterns on which effective public policies can be based. Implementing such policies will depend on certain organizational factors. Responsibility for tangible and intangible heritage must be brought together within the same agencies. And these agencies must be open not only to intangible heritage values but also to democratic participation in defining them.