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Short abstract

This paper responds to the UK’s 2024 ratification of UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) (2003). Focusing on Scotland’s Gypsy/Traveller communities, I show how ‘creative ethnography’ can help decolonise knowledge around ICH and promote more meaningful dialogues with the communities who cherish it.

Long abstract

In 2024 the UK Government ratified UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) (2003) and this paper showcases pioneering research that will lead to one of the UK’s first inscriptions on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. UNESCO inscription means ensuring worldwide visibility of the ICH, encouraging narrations of multivalent cultural knowledge, and recent theoretical approaches to the study of ICH stress the importance of emic experience over etic discourses (Kockel and MacFadyen 2019). My paper introduces the emerging anthropological field of ‘creative ethnography’ where ICH is examined through deep ethnographic engagement with tradition-bearers that seeks to avoid predictable conclusions. As a form of unwriting, creative ethnography promotes decolonial dialogues with marginalised histories and offers challenges to skewed cultural perceptions and power relations.

The paper focuses on the ICH of Scotland’s Gypsy/Traveller communities. Now a legally recognised ethnic minority, these communities have existed in Scotland as distinct from mainstream society since at least the twelfth century (Kenrick and Clark 1999). Their itinerant lifestyles and ideological commitments have resulted in distinctive yet marginalised sociocultural identities, and a deep reservoir of ICH that functions to confront hegemonically generated accounts of the past. The contemporary communities continue to experience marginalisation, yet their participation in discourses around subalternised histories and knowledge is emerging (McPhee 2021; Conyach 2024; Fell 2024). My paper demonstrates how bottom-up research within the communities can provide insights into alternative forms of knowledge production and help us better understand the communities’ unique subjectivities.