Khöömii, Chooryn Duu, and Dissonant Heritage in Inner Mongolia, China

This article sheds light on the logics that informed China's 2009 successful application and nomination of khöömii as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of China. It explores how bureaucrats charged with overseeing cultural heritage applications, while expertly aware of the requirements to satisfy the terms of the UNESCO Convention, often unknowingly distance and disenfranchise local knowledge in the process. I argue that just such a phenomenon occurred in Inner Mongolia, in which bureaucrats created a new musical taxonomy to justify the existence of and need for safeguarding of khöömii in China. Offering a close investigation into the UNESCO application, this article spotlights the practice of chooryn duu (tsooryn duu, chogur-un dagu) and the logic through which it became strategically subsumed within and conflated with khöömii for the purposes of the UNESCO application.