Paper short abstract:

Being involved in safeguarding efforts or remaining in the outsider's perspective, the global paradigm of heritage would influence the afterlife of ethnographic works. The heritagization's creativity is manifested in the variety of its bureaucratic systems and in the way it is composed.

Paper long abstract:

This paper offers an insight into the issues of a current fieldwork conducted in rural Hungary. The wider context is provided by the simultaneously existing "heritage regimes": the bureaucratic apparatus of UNESCO and a nation-state developed system based on the concept of ethnicity. The idea of heritage is far more prevalent among local communities than the real extensions of the bureaucratic "heritage regimes". With a global engagement the concept was improved step by step through the different conventions of UNESCO with a global engagement and became part of the common lexis at the different levels of social life. The creative use of the heritage varies from the possible reactions of the nation state to the movements at a local level. While the idea of heritage is implemented by the social actors, it is also used for their own particular purpose. Motivation leads further than the "pure" concept of heritage. In the spirit of heritage-making communities re-interpret certain elements of their past. In this process they use various types of knowledge that are products of different kinds of discourses. The position of the ethnographer - as the "engine" of the ethnographic knowledge-making - could no longer stay out of the picture since the outcome of the fieldwork may serve as row material for the actors in local heritagization processes. The knowledge constructed by the researcher may be handled with such a creative attitude which characterizes the managing of the heritage on the ground.