Paper short abstract:

When dealing with ICH, anthropologists are often asked to choose between a more "applied" and a more "fundamental" research perspective. However, the experience of fieldwork is often much more complex, which needs to question professional rules and to make them more flexible.

Paper long abstract:

As the call for papers puts it, anthropologists dealing with ICH have more and more to navigate between expertise and critical analysis. On the one hand they are asked to reinforce the UNESCO rules by helping the communities to write down their candidature files. On the other hand the disciplinary canons urge them to deconstruct the UNESCO system and to critically emphasize its limits regarding the study of the complex meanings of living cultures. Therefore, anthropologists are caught in a double-bind alternative which is often identified as an opposition between more "applied" and more "fundamental" research. However, things are never as simple as that. In this paper I will show that the rules anthropologists use to consider ICH need to be very flexible. During fieldwork, they have to train the communities to use the anthropological tools and to engage in self-criticism. Working with the institutions in charge of the implementation of ICH, they have to show how their disciplin will be helpful for cultural politics. Discussing their findings with colleagues, they need to make them understand the specificities of the field. In order to assume these multiple positions at once, they eventually need to engage in a global ethical and epistemological reflection regarding their own professional practice. Empirical material related with the inventory of ICH in France and Belgium will be used to feed our demonstration.