Abstract
In 2008, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) established three registers that, combined, constitute its Lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage. In doing so, the agency institutionalised a paradox. By very definition, the intangible is that which resists capture–eluding measurement, representation, or code. In the case of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), to note intangibility is to acknowledge the embodied, tacit dimensions of cultural practice itself. And yet, by arresting such lived practice into fixed categories and representations, the UNESCO lists obfuscate, if not undermine, the very vitality they purport to safeguard. In this paper, I introduce HORIZON Europe’s RELISH Project; an interdisciplinary and cross-institutional effort to archive social and cultural intangible practice in line with changing conceptions of heritage within the field of European culinary culture. Rather than providing an overview of the project’s aims, I offer an ethnographic account of its practices, tracing how actors within the RELISH consortium negotiate between the fixity of databases, visualisations, and metadata and the fluidity that defines culinary ICH. Attending to these tensions, I argue that if preservation is to remain a meaningful priority for museums and other heritage projects, orientations toward intangibility must be reconfigured. I make a case for a mode of archiving that embraces imperfect representation–one that foregrounds the distance between the traces of action and the act, and which treats that distance as a curatorial value rather than a technical flaw or challenge to be overcome.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Intangible Cultural Heritage, Authenticity, Conservation, Heritage, Acquisition, Representation
