The Politics and the Practices of Intangible Cultural Heritage Les politiques et les pratiques du patrimoine culturel immatériel

The articles of this thematic issue of Ethnologies deal with the politics and the practices of intangible cultural heritage in a comparative and international perspective, bringing together scholars from Canada, the United States, Brazil, Great Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland and Iceland. Specialists in cultural studies, oral traditions, social anthropology, cultural history, historical archaeology, and museum studies address the issues raised by the policies, politics, processes and practices by this new category of heritage largely created in the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, entered into force in 2006 and now ratified by 167 countries. Critical of narrow technocratic approaches, the authors strive to flesh out the meaning of this new convention and what it will do or not do for intangible heritage and heritage more generally. They examine the practices of the Convention itself, such as the listing of elements of ICH and the impact of this practice on communities, museums and tourism. The hope is that their contributions will help better understand the complex and capacious interactions between policy, process and practice in the field of intangible cultural heritage, which is often qualified as the least developed aspect of postcolonial research. The work on this theme began when I was the William Lyon McKenzie King Visiting Professor in Canadian Studies at the Weatherhead Center of Harvard University. The Convention had just recently entered into force and, because of my strong interest in heritage, tangible and intangible, I was wondering why Canada and the United States had not ratified it. It seemed to me that intangible cultural heritage (oral traditions, traditional knowledge, rituals, festivals, song, music, dance) could greatly enhance the meaning of tangible heritage (buildings, sites, landscapes, routes, objects) and thus contribute to providing a richer, more complete, dynamic, and inclusive vision and practice of cultural heritage. I was aware of the strong impact that the 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage, ratified by both Canada and the United States, had had on the preservation and recognition of natural and historic sites in Canada and abroad, and could not help but think that this new convention could have an equally positive effect on living traditions. I organized a seminar and a conference on the topic and invited scholars from Canada and the United States to take stock of the different perspectives on the topic, namely Richard Kurin, who had been an advisor to the American government on the Convention, and Gerald Pocius, who had drawn up a position paper on the subject for the Canadian government. (Kurin and Pocius in this volume). I continued thinking about ICH legislation and organizing seminars and conferences on the theme. The year following the seminar at Harvard University, my Canada Research Chair in Intangible Heritage co-organized in Quebec City the joint Folklore Studies Association Annual Meeting and the American Folklore Society Annual Meeting on the challenges of intangible cultural heritage for folklore scholars. Shortly thereafter, I chaired the 16^th ICOMOS General Assembly Scientific Symposium on the theme of “ Finding the Spirit of Place: Between the Intangible and the Tangible”, leading to the Quebec City Declaration on the Preservation of the Spirit of Place, adopted on October 4^th, 2008. The co-organization in 2010 of the Annual Meeting of the Société des musées québécois gave the opportunity to investigate the potentialities of intangible cultural heritage for museums. These efforts and many others contributed to having intangible cultural heritage integrated into the new law on cultural heritage in the province of Quebec in 2012. Quebec is the first Canadian province to introduce intangible …