Working Group on Cultural Heritage and Property

Members of the working group, along with other SIEF members, are actively involved in the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage and the celebration of its 20th anniversary. The WG announces upcoming conferences.

The SIEF Working Group on Cultural Heritage and Property was established at the 2008 Derry congress, to address the growing interest in the field of cultural heritage, its symbolic and economic power, as well as contingent political implications. Its interests and activities encompass issues of heritage policy, theory, and practice.

Any SIEF member is welcome to join our working group. To join, send an email to Carley Williams or Robert Baron, and make sure to register for the Working Group mailing list online.

Cultural Heritage and Property (CHP) Working Group members were happy to gather together again in person in Brno in June. WG activities included a round table reflecting on the 20th Anniversary of the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. 

Members of our working group, along with other SIEF members, are actively involved with the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity through the ICH NGO Forum, as expert advisors to state party delegations, UNESCO accredited facilitators, as well as several UNESCO Chairs. In this year of the 20th Anniversary celebrations, the 18th annual Intergovernmental Committee (18.COM) meeting will take place in Kasane, Republic of Botswana from Monday 4 to Saturday 9 December 2023. 

The ICH NGO Forum is programming a number of events, including a one-day symposium, to run alongside the 18.COM meetings from December 3 at the same venue. To mark the 20th anniversary of the UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, and to expand accredited NGOs’ foundational works, the Executive Board of the ICH NGO Forum, in association with Mali’s Permanent Delegation to UNESCO, will present a Symposium and Poster Sessions exploring the past, present and future of safeguarding collaborations involving multiple stakeholders. Presentations will feature NGOs discussing their collaborations with other NGOs, governments, and the private sector.

SIEF members are welcome to register and attend the UNESCO meeting. The schedule of ICH NGO Forum events and general information and working documents for 18.COM will be posted online in due course. Please let Robert Baron, Carley Williams and Sophie Elpers know if you plan to attend in Botswana before registering. It is also possible to watch the entire proceedings live online via the UNESCO ICH website.

Our CHP WG members are busy as ever with research projects, conferences, and publications. A few are included here, and we ask CHP members to keep us informed of other activities of interest to the WG. Publications by members are listed on the SIEF WG web page.

The Project “iNTANGIBLE: Digitizing Intangible Cultural Heritage amidst the digital shift” (2021-1-RO01-KA220-VET-000034794) is a strategic partnership in the field of vocational education and training, funded through the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union (2022-2023), implemented by 5 institutions from Romania, Greece, Cyprus, and Croatia. One of the project’s results is the publication Handbook for professionals (Palatul Culturii Publishing House, Iasi, 2023) in the field of digitizing intangible cultural heritage by offering clear and accessible steps towards understanding the existing practices and strategies of using digital technologies for storing, preserving, and disseminating intangible cultural heritage data.

An upcoming conference, Intangible Cultural Heritage in Rural Areas: Appropriations and Instrumentalizations, will aim to shed light on the extent to which current forms of intangible cultural heritage in rural areas of Europe, especially in the course of application and inscription processes in national and international lists, are affected by different forms of appropriations and instrumentalizations. The program here extends from research focused on economically-motivated (competitive) constellations surrounding the registration or rejection of certain phenomena, to populist appropriations of rural traditions as sites of conservative preservation, and (right-wing) political narratives that are now being conveyed in numerous European countries. The conference will be held in a bilingual format with contributions in both German and English and is organized by the Junior Professorship for European Ethnology with focus on Intangible Cultural Heritage at the Otto-Friedrich-University Bamberg from March 20–22, 2024. The conference program will be published at the beginning of November, where you will also find more detailed information on registration and the proceedings.

Heritage on the Margins? Central and Eastern European Perspectives, the first conference of the Association for Critical Heritage Studies Central and Eastern European Chapter, will take place November 29–30, in Ljubljana, Slovenija. The conference aims to further discuss identified common themes of the Central and East European heritage studies; marginality vs. centrality, the impact of WW1 and WW2, the interplay of borders and routes, displacement of people, differentiated legacies of (post)socialism and future CEE heritage prospects. Its intention is to stimulate discussion about how various case studies of heritagization in CEE can contribute to wider critical heritage studies.

And, plans are underway for the biennial CHP WG meeting. We are excited to partner with the SIEF Working Group on Archives and the Archives of Latvian Folklore to develop a collaborative international conference in celebration of the institution’s 100th anniversary from October 29–31, 2024 in Riga, Latvia.

The conference, Archives of Traditional Culture: 100 + 10, will deal broadly with retrospective and prospective dimensions of archives of folklore, ethnology, and ethnography, encompassing both historical documentation and documentation of living traditions practiced today. The centenary provides an opportunity to take stock and address a diverse range of issues related to the past, present, and future of archives of traditional culture relevant to ethnologists, folklorists, heritage scholars and ICH practitioners.

A detailed call for proposals can be found on page 35 of the Pdf and will be circulated through the CHP WG email list. 

Robert Baron and Carley Williams, Co-Chairs, Cultural Heritage and Property Working Group