Festivals as a Site of Contesting Heritagisation: Contending Local Aspirations and Governmental Authorisations

Abstract (English)

Since the 1990s governments have displayed ever increasing interest in registering various types of sites, structures, knowledges and events as heritage. Heritage recognition can be enacted at various levels: state or province, nation, regional alliance (e.g. European Union, ASEAN) and the globe, with the latter level largely the domain of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. However, such heritage recognition represents an act of authorisation that always imposes parameters of acceptability and access that may significantly alter such heritage so as to cater to tourists’ tastes and promote the images that governments wish to convey of their national treasures, developmental aspirations and ethnic harmony.

Heritage determinations have increased in magnitude since UNESCO expanded the scope of ‘cultural objects’ to include intangible heritage following upon the 2001 International Round Table on Intangible Cultural Heritage in Turin (Bortolotto 2007). One of the most common categories of intangible heritage that has been registered is festivals. In fact, it is the category with the highest number (233) of entries in the UNESCO Lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage and the Register of good safeguarding practices. However, especially in those countries whose governments have instituted policies of decentralisation, festivals and similar types of cultural celebration are often conceived and organized at the lower administrative units, such as states/provinces and counties, which then seek to gain recognition of their festivals at higher national and global levels. Building upon both secular and religious events and practices, these processes have produced multiple political dynamics in which local aspirations to continue customary practices and vernacular rituals have often been thwarted by governmental imperatives to transform these in accord with official standards of propriety and patriotism for festival performance.

This panel seeks presentations that explore these dynamics of how festivals and similar cultural events – fairs, installations, sports and gastronomic competitions, art exhibitions, regattas, concerts, and many others – have transformed practice in local contexts. Papers may deal with various dimensions of both officialisation of such performances in cultural policies and the overt and covert contestation of officially imposed parameters by various participants, including not only government officials and local performers, but also tourists and other audience members, in these processes of heritagization (Harrison 2013; Walsh 1992). Approaches to analysing these dynamics may derive from a variety of theoretical perspectives, including cultural politics, political economy, practice theory, critical heritage studies, postcolonialism, feminist paradigms, and many others.