The Search for Distinctiveness: Challenges and Dilemmas within the Concept of Intangible Cultural Heritage Preservation and Representation

The paper discusses the role of anthropology in the protection of intangible heritage, which significantly pre-dates the bureaucratic concept defined by UNESCO’s 2003 Convention, and takes a look at the various dilemmas arising from the Convention’s practical implementation. It looks at social practices that cannot be protected because they clash with the concept of human rights protection, or with contemporary positive legislation; at the exoticization of practices that are in reality still alive, but are represented as though they were not; at the relationship between the global and the local, with the aim of highlighting the various kinds of ambivalence within the concept itself, which the implementers of the Convention are usually unaware of.