Cultural Heritage in Transit: Intangible Rights as Human Rights ed. by Deborah Kapchan (review)

I. INTRODUCTION

By analyzing the unintended consequences of the intangible cultural heritage industry, this important book shows how the ambiguities of culture can be most apparent at its intersection with law. An agreed definition of culture remains elusive across fields of inquiry; however, what is agreed is that culture is dynamic and invented (or reinvented), rather than static or inert. Rather than a product, culture is a process that has no well-defined boundaries and multiple influencers.¹ Contested definitions of culture also impact upon notions of cultural rights within human rights law. As with the concept of culture, scholars have noted that cultural rights are often messy, ambiguous, and disputed. Partially due to its scope and dynamism, culture is a concept that does not translate well into legal terms.²

What then is “cultural heritage”? According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), tangible cultural heritage includes architectural works, monumental sculpture and painting, archaeological structures, inscriptions, cave dwellings, and other features, which are of outstanding universal value from the point of view of history, art, or science.³ By contrast, intangible cultural heritage includes the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills—as well as the instruments, objects, artifacts, and cultural spaces associated there-with—that communities, groups, and individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage.⁴ Scholars have noted that in this way intangible cultural heritage is tantamount to “living heritage embodied in people.”⁵ The 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage was designed to protect such heritage. However, this Convention only covers intangible cultural heritage compatible with international human rights instruments.⁶

This book, Cultural Heritage in Transit: Intangible Rights as Human Rights, is an edited volume by Deborah Kapchan in which she draws together highly qualified scholars of folklore, ethnography, and anthropology who address contemporary issues of intangible cultural heritage around the world. The volume examines the effects of the cultural heritage industry and legislation by UNESCO—the key international organization on culture—on intangible cultural heritage. The seven contributors focus on the transformation of intangible culture, the role of the heritage industry and the state, as well as the implications for human rights. The contributions address topics including carnival in the Caribbean, Swedish folk life, Romani music, modern paganism in Britain, and performers on Jma’ el-Fna in Morocco.

This book builds on prior literature on cultural heritage and human rights, but pays particular attention to the ironies of the heritage industry.⁷ The stated aims of the UNESCO Convention include to safeguard and ensure respect for intangible cultural heritage and to provide for international cooperation and assistance.⁸ Kapchan uses the focus in the book on irony to highlight the “often unintended and almost always unofficial consequences of heritage production” that go beyond these stated aims of the Convention.⁹ The book poses the important question: if the heritage industry codifies or recognizes certain parts of cultural heritage, then what parts are selected and whose rights are protected? Conversely, what parts are implicitly rejected (or delegitimized) and who is excluded? This is the first crucial theme of the book: to whom does culture belong, who can be its steward or bearer, and who is included and excluded?

A second theme of the book is the reform and commodification of culture through the intangible heritage industry. Contributors tease out how the heritage industry, incidentally or otherwise, can operate as an instrument of reform, method of control, and mechanism of commodification. Hafstein notes in his contribution that the state’s intervention into cultural practices—practices that were previously only of nominal interest to administrators—gives rise to greater regulation of public social life.¹⁰ A number of the contributions focus on the relationship between cultural heritage and tourism, specifically highlighting how the state or private actors can utilize the heritage industry to transform local cultural practices into a commodity and their performers into...