Putting Intangible Heritage in its place(s): proposals for policy and practice

Abstract

The regrettable split between tangible and intangible heritage specialisations should be brought to an end. Just as many (tangible) places owe their importance to intangible values, so too 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 a compelling need for policies that do so. To develop them, heritage experts will need to look beyond the kinds of cultural manifestations favoured by tourism and focus instead on ordinary, everyday places. Paying attention to the narratives expressed through people’s customs, stories, and memories can give heritage professionals invaluable insights 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 environmentbehaviour studies to analyse people’s place-relationships and organise their apparently limitless subjectivity into coherent patterns on which effective public policies can be based. Implementing such policies will depend on certain organisational 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.