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Heritage on Demand: UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Initiative in Croatian Context

The article critically engages with the articulations and manifestations of a UNESCO initiative for the safeguarding of so-called intangible cultural heritage in Croatian context in the first years of the active Croatian implementation of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2009–2013). It presents the intersections of a UNESCO initiative with past and present thnology and folklore research in Croatia. Though one might get the impression (not entirely unfounded) that the project of protecting or safeguarding intangible heritage within the Croatian context first and foremost constitutes a global, imported product, the notion of protecting or safeguarding intangible cultural heritage can also be traced in the history of Croatian ethnology, folkloristics, art conservation, legislation, and folklore festivals production. A strong tendency to transform culture into a slick product can be seen as the main or only ‘innovative’ aspect of transmitting the old concepts into the contemporary framework of the UNESCO initiative. It seems like this aspect makes it easier for everyone involved – state administration and experts and those to whom a given cultural practice ‘belongs’ – to ignore ‘the side effects’ of the UNESCO initiative and the processes of its implementation that are discussed in the article. These side effects, perhaps not so visibly, concern society as a whole, and more directly local communities, as well as our specific professions and disciplines: ethnology and folkloristics. A somewhat different variant of this article was originally published in Croatian, as an introduction to Proizvodnja baštine: kritičke studije o nematerijalnoj kulturi (The Production of Heritage: Critical Studies on Intangible Culture) (edited by Marijana Hameršak, Iva Pleše, and Ana-Marija Vukušić), a collection of essays published in 2013 by the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb.

Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, Croatia, ethnology and folkloristics, heritage production, intangible cultural heritage, UNESCO

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