Paper short abstract:

Changes upon the Eastern Adriatic cultural landscapes experienced during EU-memberships candidacy and entrance years had proved the importance of supranational factors, important in viticultural history as well as intangible cultural heritage means used for collective intellectual property protection.

Paper long abstract:

The Eastern Adriatics represent an example area of forging "Otherness" since the invention of borderland Morlacchi in the Enlightenment era, notorious Balkan foklore during Romanticism and subsequent revivals, up to internecine tribal hatreds from recent stereotypes. Here as elsewhere, new preservational category of intangible cultural heritage offered venues where local communities could also claim collective intellectual property upon parts of their culture. In cultural landscapes entitled with prominent biocultural heritage such claims appeared simultaneously with accession years of EU-memberships. Once more, changes of dramatic proportions in coastal landscapes exposed to vibrant natural climate were induced supranationally, now prone to global consumption.

These new developments had offered possibilities for understanding of so-called traditional landscapes, their products and associated heritage as commodities from the onset, ingrained in the concept of folklore. Recent reconceptualisation through intangible cultural heritage, autonomous reflection of an older European "Arts and Crafts" antimodernist movement, actually gave more active means of control to the collective creators. Results could be observed in a number of material and symbolic exchanges, remoulding of cultural icons and market entrances of small and soft competitors. We shall expose consequent analysis from the perspective of an ethnologist, based upon a dozen of coastal and island localities. An argument for commodity capacities of biocultural registry under control of culture creators shall be articulated. While observing legal inovations of the past two decades, possible trajectory of refined regulations is another issue for discussion between social, humanistic and natural domains which social anthropology is able to deliver.