engleski

UNESCO’s Program of Intangible Cultural Heritage, Women, and the Issue of Gender Equality

The author offers a gender sensitive critique of UNESCO’s program on intangible cultural heritage following the few feminist anthropologists who have pointed out its “blindness” for a frequent opposition between the idea of gender equality and the reality of traditional cultures. It has already been observed that the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage bears ambiguities as regards its ultimate outcomes and its capacity to accommodate various identity positions and social groupings. The author suggests that politics of intervention, be it in the name of the most humanistic ideals, such as the case with UNESCO’s example, cannot solve tensions between affirmation and antidiscrimination, human and cultural rights, cultural diversity and intercultural dialogue, intellectual property and common good, speech in the name of pluralizing and work in essentializing of culture. Focusing on the example of the Bistritsa Babi, a well-known group of elderly women singers from Bistritsa in western Bulgaria, the author tries to illustrate the still unresolved ambiguity of whether heritage programs are basically empowering for women or if they confine women within traditional, usually basically patriarchal social arrangements. She also describes gender structure of the Croatian national list of intangible cultural heritage and the international Representative List, and comments on UNESCO’s latest emphasis given to the gender aspect of safeguarding as an attempt to overcome tensions between human and cultural rights.

intangible cultural heritage, women, gender equality, human rights, cultural rights

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