engleski

Negotiating Intangible Culture: Examples from the Ethnographic museum of Istria

As many ethnographic museums, the regional Ethnographic Museum of Istria in Pazin (Croatia) has realized that stressing the intangible aspects of museum material is (and has been) the best way of contextualizing exhibits and communicating with the audience through objects. Furthermore, we have concluded that a good method of connecting elements of intangible culture with visitors is through workshops organized in our museum, where visitors can be introduced to traditional skills and make their own product. In this way, instead of being observers, they became sharers and participants of a cultural practice. One target group for this kind of museum activity is tourists, most often foreigners who stay at one of the numerous local agrotourisms (rural households adapted for lodging tourists). Deep community interest in ICH led to the founding of the Centre for Intangible Culture, established as an annex of the Ethnographic museum of Istria in 2011. The Centre’s aim is not only to research, archive and document intangible culture, but it also strives to be a place of dissemination, education and popularization. The centre endeavors to inspire creative individuals to use elements of ICH in new cultural production. The choice of not including the word “heritage” in the name of the Centre is not by chance: it reflects our understanding of intangible culture that will be augmented in the paper. This kind of approach will be compared to similar initiatives and projects in Croatia. The understanding of ICH as a transforming, negotiable, dynamic phenomenon (as opposed to petrified and strictly-defined heritag)e has led to many creative interpretations of cultural traditions. However, this approach has also been criticized by some communities, folklore group leaders, and even tradition-bearers, who tend to understand their heritage as defined and fixed. These groups of people may tend either to have strict rules how cultural assets should be performed, have their specific versions of “truths” about their history and/or don’t want to share their heritage with other communities. This relation itself can be an interesting theme for anthropologists to research, although such situations create a demanding position for the Ethnographic museum of Istria and it’s Centre for Intangible Culture. In this text several examples are given, as well as a comparison with similar situations elsewhere in Croatia. The question that remains to be answered is how a regional museum may deal with Intangible Culture in a way that is satisfactory for all those who are involved - either as bearers, creative interpreters or interested audience.

Museum ; workshops ; communities ; intangible heritage

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