Paper short abstract:

What if cultural heritage include racist elements? I argue for an approach that is both ethnographic and relational. Both cultural and human rights are inalienable, but how they relate to one another depends on the specific context in which they are claimed and contested.

Paper long abstract:

In the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage’, the Unesco asserts that ‘deterioration or disappearance of any item of the cultural or natural heritage constitutes a harmful impoverishment of the heritage of all the nations of the world’, and therefore needs to be safeguarded. However, what if such items of cultural heritage include racist elements?

In this presentation I will discuss the contestation of the Dutch Saint Nicholas tradition. The controversy centers around Black Pete, minstrel-like, blackfaced, and buffoonish servant of the Saint. The figure was added to the celebration in the nineteenth century and has since gained enormous popularity across the nation. While critique of the blackface figure has been continuous throughout the twentieth century, an emerging civil rights movement has considerably increased political pressure to abandon the figure, with a majority of people in the Netherlands now accepting change. At the same time, the Saint Nicholas celebration, explicitly including Black Pete, was added to the national inventory of intangible cultural heritage.

What does this conflict between cultural rights and human rights teach us about heritage ethics? In this presentation I will argue for an approach that is both ethnographic and relational. Both cultural and human rights are inalienable, but how they relate to one another depends on the specific context in which they are claimed and contested – a context that needs to be analyzed ethnographically.