Paper short abstract:

Can intangible cultural heritage models be refocused to protect the historical transmission of nature-as-culture? Looking at the political uses of folk revivals, this paper asks whether folk music and dance have the space to creatively respond to the crises and fluid identities of the Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I will explore whether folk culture can move on from constructing identities based around static notions of the ethnic nation-state to reflect the fluid realities of life in the Anthropocene. Reflecting on folk revivals in contemporary Europe, I will question whether intangible cultural heritage (ICH) models can be refocused onto the non-human for communities to connect their embodied experience of landscape historically through folk music and dance in response to increasingly rapid environmental and cultural change.

Founded in human rights discourse, ICH frameworks serve to protect the communities that produce traditional culture, which in turn has the political function of legitimising a group’s claims to sovereignty and protection. Within this framework, I will reflect on two examples of folk revivals that emerged in the mid-late twentieth century, the Hungarian táncház (dance house) movement and the English folk song movement. Both have developed in different ways but in their current unstable political contexts risk being co-opted to construct narrow, ethnicist definitions of national identity.

As we tentatively emerge from a global pandemic, we find an inward-looking ethnonationalism ever-more at odds with the lived reality of a global society experiencing climate crisis, mass migration and expanding reliance on the digital sphere. By repositioning the ICH model onto the non-human, where the natural world rather than the humans responding to it is understood as the transmitter of culture, I question whether we can protect nature-as-culture through creatively acknowledging identities based around historically shifting landscapes and communities.