Paper short abstract:

This contribution proposes to investigate some anthropological predicaments engendered by the UNESCO initiated programmes under the aegis of safeguarding the intangible cultural heritage, and being contextualized in the emergent heritage regimes, institutionalized power and grassroots politics.

Paper long abstract:

This analysis of cultural politics investigates relations between engaged professionals, the communities, the state and UNESCO in the contingencies of globalization, postcolonial empowerment, cross-cultural relations, and heritage management. Cultural heritage, as a value-laden project of ideology plays on the category of time while making claims for ownership and generating hierarchical selections of expressive forms or cultural practices. The employment of the notion of 'heritage' comprises a capacity to overshadow the complexities of history and politics. My contribution proposes to investigate some anthropological predicaments engendered by the UNESCO initiated projects and programmes under the aegis of safeguarding the intangible cultural heritage. They'll be contextualized in the emergent heritage regimes, institutionalized power and grassroots politics.The UNESCO initiatives ambivalently resort to ethnographic expertise in defining the field and identifying the aspects of concern, or, ambivalently, of celebration, but the global organization eventually operates via governmental mediation. Thus this intervention that generates, or re-shifts and complicates explicit and implicit hierarchies in/for the communities involved simultaneously denies them international representation outside of the state advocacy. However, an reflexive anthropological investigation of the grassroots levels of engagement in cultural politics reveals enabling moments of contestation and potentials for agency in the context of intangible heritage despite the prerequisite of authoritative representation.