Paper Short Abstract:

This paper draws on new research into heritage entrepreneurship in Singapore. It focuses on the challenges of identification experienced by research partners engaged in entrepreneurialism involving botanical knowledge and edible products.

Paper Abstract:

This paper draws on new research into heritage entrepreneurship in Singapore. The larger project takes seriously the decades-long research findings of folklorists, anthropologists, and other heritage specialists that heritage (like culture and folklore more generally, and in particular intangible cultural heritage [ICH]), is defined by the transmission of values, skills, knowledges, and practices; by processes of communal valuation; and by transformation in this dual process. In other words, the revival of heritage may share much with “entrepreneurship” in other domains – especially in pro-tech and hyper-modern landscapes (like Singapore, but not only), where there is substantial social and economic support for innovation, including support for “social enterprise”, but less desire to “preserve” or “maintain” vestiges of the past. The concept of entrepreneurship in use here focuses not on the commoditization of heritage, but on processes – conceptual as well as economic – that are more akin to capitalization, investment, or revaluation. This paper concentrates on a subset of research participants whose entrepreneurialism engages with botanic knowledge and edible products, and outlines the challenges they face in identifying their work within the existing legal and social categories of commercial F&B, social enterprises, and heritage work, as well as in choosing how to identify themselves as a small-business, freelancer, or entrepreneur.