Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenor:
-
Naila Ceribasic
(Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research)
- Stream:
- Heritage
- Location:
- A102
- Sessions:
- Monday 22 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Zagreb
Short Abstract:
By focusing on various roles that academically trained ethnographers play either overtly or covertly in the UNESCO's program of intangible cultural heritage, the panel aims to comprehend the current profile of ethnographic disciplines and, especially, their prospects in the early 21st century.
Long Abstract:
UNESCO's program of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) figures as an exemplary compound of the congress keywords - i.e., of retro-utopias, mundane realities, heritage production, and the role of ethnology, cultural anthropology, folklore studies, ethnomusicology and ethnochoreology in the early 21st century. This panel focuses on the last component, asking whether the ICH program functions as just an additional market niche for the application of ethnographic knowledge or is, rather, a symptom of a broader transformation of ethnographic scholarship into facilitation of collaborative strategies (including advocacy and activism) and new forms of education (in particular so-called "capacity building"), mediation between communities, governments and various stakeholders (including private sector enterprises), and unspecified expertise that is still necessary for writing and examining a growing amount of various ICH documents. Significantly, although the program deals with the subject matter of ethnographic disciplines and relies on their contemporary canon (in particular by positioning communities as central authorities), the names of the disciplines very rarely appear in ICH material (and then frequently in negative sense), and academically trained ethnographers, although they do participate in the program, are hidden under the umbrella of NGOs, governmental bodies, communities concerned or, at best, make a part of "experts". The panel participants are invited to provide in-depth description of the roles of academically trained ethnographers in the ICH program, with a special focus on their contribution to the program's (as well as disciplinary) utopian potential and/or the realities on the ground (e.g. harmonious humanity, commercial expediency, sustainable development, etc.).
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 22 June, 2015, -Paper short abstract:
With the experience of a scholar in the field of ethnochoreology and in the same time a state employee, in this panel I‘ll try to compare the ambiguity of the system for safeguarding the Intangible Cultural Heritage from both perspectives.
Paper long abstract:
The system for safeguarding of the intangible cultural heritage in Republic of Macedonia has a complex structure. Its mechanisms primarily are focused on a cultural and an educational state strategy, but in practice it is brought down to very precisely and complicated administrative, frequently, very long procedure, without satisfied and prompt financial support for those who are involved in the system of safeguarding the ICH.
To coordinate all the system's factors (with different role in the processes), in 2005 the Directorate for protection of the Cultural Heritage (UZKN) was established, with a status of a separate institution under the umbrella of the Ministry of Culture. With the experience of a scholar and in the same time a state administrator in this field, in this panel I'll try to compare the system for safeguarding the Intangible cultural heritage from both perspectives, because keeping sustainable this system, is merely a process of various negotiations, and often of political decisions/"manipulations", in which the professionalism, the ethic approach from all involved stake holders is crucial.
Paper short abstract:
Based on my personal experiences of implementing UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of ICH in Serbia, the presentation will focus on ethical and professional dilemmas regarding this kind of participation in cultural policy.
Paper long abstract:
On a general level, the experience of Serbia in the implementation of UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of ICH is marked by its position of a candidate for EU membership and the influences of local multiparty policies in the field of culture, and, consequently, by unarticulated roles of experts, including academically trained ethnographers. In the beginning, ethnomusicologists were not recognized as relevant experts for the heritage safeguarding and they were not included into the processes of education and institutionalisation at the national level. This kind of marginalisation led to the problems already at the level of inventorying music and dance heritage. However, the most delicate problems have been those on the relation between the local communities and the experts, so they will be in the focus of the presentation.
A personal experience of invetorying the epic singing with the gusle accompaniment as an element of ICH, in particular regarding the relationship with fieldwork collaborators, has been the source of many dilemmas, both ethical and professional, which led to much self-reflection on the purpose of this type of professional engagement.
Having in mind the actuality of ICH safeguarding, a reflection on both the influence of applied ethnomusicology and ICTM activism on ethnomusicologists' and ethnochoreologists' dedication to the Convention implementation, as well as the related influences of these experiences on researchers' profiles, my aim is emphasise the responsibility of scholarly organisations in the humanities, taking into account the market value of this type of knowledge, and a general social position of a researcher working in this field.
Paper short abstract:
UNESCO’s ICH program has its counterpart in the World Intellectual Property Organisation where ethnologists are hard at work on possible conventions for the protection of traditional culture. I will discuss the role of these experts and the impact of their knowledge on the current debate.
Paper long abstract:
Since its adoption in 2003 UNESCO's ICH program has (among other things) influenced a number of other UN initiatives, including the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the recent World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) committee on Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Traditional Cultural Expressions (formerly known as "Folklore"). In fact, until the mid-1980's UNESCO and WIPO actively collaborated on this specific issue. A number of ethnologists, anthropologists and folklorists have participated in the debates on intellectual property-type protection for folklore at the WIPO headquarters in Geneva, in both the current intergovernmental committee or IGC (since 2000) and previous instances of this debate in the 20th century. These people have participated in their role as activists, NGO representatives, participants in various capacity-building programs and as expert advisors to both NGO and government parties. Although WIPO is traditionally a forum for experts in intellectual property law and the debate often seems to revolve more around either legal-technical issues of international policymaking or diplomatic prestige than the essentials of the subject-matter, it is clear that ethnographic knowledge gets instrumentalised in various ways in the discussions where it acquires a value that may sometimes seem far removed from what ethnologists are used to attribute to it. Based on my own participant observation at the WIPO IGC I will discuss the part played by these "ethnographers" in the forum, and their influence and possible impact on the texts being proposed and debated.
Paper short abstract:
Taking the engagement of ethnomusicologists in the program of safeguarding ICH as a highly significant example, the author examines the prospects of ethnomusicology in the early 21st century, suggesting a collaborative-academic ethnomusicology as a workable solution.
Paper long abstract:
The authority of communities in identifying and defining their ICH, which is embedded in the 2003 Convention, is simultaneously one of fundamental methodological, epistemological, and ethical principles in the work of ethnomusicologists worldwide. One can argue that the Convention actually reflects a pronounced collaborative approach to fieldwork and subsequent ethnographic representation, which has been developing in ethnographic disciplines since the 1980s. Looking from the perspective of doing ethnomusicology at home, in Croatia, this paper seeks to elucidate similarities and differences between collaborative methodologies as charted in the ICH program and in ethnomusicology as an academic discipline. Is there a danger that the former will engulf the latter, particularly in the context of ethnomusicologists being themselves increasingly engaged in applying their knowledge in "solving concrete problems", and "influencing social interaction and course of cultural change" (cf. Mission Statement of the ICTM Study Group on Applied Ethnomusicology)? Why ethnomusicologists, while employing distinctly collaborative ways of knowledge production, more often than not (have to) defend themselves from the "ivory tower" suspicion? Because they still do not fit in with neoliberal agenda? Because the audience interested in their standard outcomes is indeed very limited? If so, should they pay even greater attention to non-textual representations? How then they would fit into academic standards of excellence? The author argues that the ICH program has demonstrated (but didn't yet acknowledge) a great need for cultural translation, where the role of academically trained ethnographers is irreplaceable. Is it a signal that collaborative-academic ethnomusicology has a chance?