Theory and Practice. Ethnographic Approaches to Cultural Heritage and an Empirical Example from Western Ukraine

Abstract

The study focuses on the examination of today's ethnographical approaches and theoretical-methodological paradigms of cultural heritage, as well as everyday social practices related to heritagization (preparing lists of local values and Hungarikums, monumentalization, festivalization, musealization, etc.). In the first part of the paper, the author briefly describes the most common ethnographic approaches to the concept of cultural heritage, as well as the most important related analytical models. He argues for approaching heritage phenomena and their various manifestations (objects, places, and practices) through a kind of ontological framework. Through an empirical example — the analysis of the collection/preservation of values that started after 2010 among the Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia — the study presents the local/regional practices and ritual and symbolic patterns of heritage making in the Western Ukrainian region. Examining the activities of minority political–cultural elites, the author analyzes the transformations of meanings through which the individual local cultural assets or certain accentuated elements become global social realities, for example national/translocal heritage objects.