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The Digital ICH Observatory aims to produce, organise and analyse information about e-Inventories of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH).
A network to share knowledge and practices about ICH that is on the web

Bibliography

Type
Article
Year
2020
Author
Chiara BORTOLOTTO, Philipp DEMGENSKI, Panas KARAMPAMPAS and Simone TOJI
Title
Proving participation: vocational bureaucrats and bureaucratic creativity in the implementation of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage
Abstrat
This paper investigates the bureaucratisation of the (utopian) ideal of community participation in Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) safeguarding and management. The analysis considers the whole ‘policy life’ of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of ICH. Our ethnographic examples from UNESCO, Brazil, China and Greece illustrate how bureaucratic operations often disenchant the participatory ideal, alienating it from its original intention. At the same time, driven by their commitment to ‘good’ governance and informed by sentiments of frustration and disappointment with actual policy results, vocational bureaucrats at different administrative levels experiment with and conceive of new tools in order to produce evidence of participa-tion. We demonstrate how this bureaucratic creativity has concrete consequences, which may differ from the intended utopia, but nevertheless bring to life particular interpretations of the participatory principle among the recipients for whom heritage policies were originally designed. Thus, we present a more nuanced picture of bureaucratisation in which of?cials’ emotions and engagement sustain their agency against structural con-straints as well as the futility and fragility of administrative procedures.
Keywords
Intangible Cultural Heritage, bureaucratic creativity, vocational bureaucrats, UNESCO, participation of communities
Bibliographic reference
Chiara BORTOLOTTO, Philipp DEMGENSKI, Panas KARAMPAMPAS and Simone TOJI (2020) "Proving participation: vocational bureaucrats and bureaucratic creativity in the implementation of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage" In Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, Volume 28, Issue 1, February 2020, Pages 66-82 © 2020 European Association of Social Anthropologists Available ONLINE at: https://www.academia.edu/42083870/Proving_Participation_Vocational_bureaucrats_and_bureaucratic_creativity_in_the_implementation_of_the_UNESCO_Convention_for_the_Safeguarding_of_the_Intangible_Cultural_Heritage [Accessed 20/03/2020]