Le patrimoine immateriel en France entre renouveau museographique et <<territoire de project>>.(French heritage and museological/museograhical issues, territory projects)

In the eyes of a large part of the French ethnologists community, France's signing of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention in 2006 opened a new era in the history of its heritage. For some, it is a question of radically shaking loose the traditional values of French heritage and public policy, dominated by the monopoly of high culture and, specifically, tine arts. For others, it is at least a question of a field of opportunity opening up to the discipline and its recognition. Putting this decision in an historical perspective requires a return to the conditions and limitations of the institutionalisation of ethnological heritage over the course of the "heritage years" of the 1980s. Two issues merged at the end of this twenty year period. The first, museological and museographical, directly arises from the perpetual and unresolved crisis of how to collect items of ethnological interest, display them, or turn them into items for scientific inquiry. The second rests with the relationship between projects of regional identity--or "territory projects," which have been growing in number since 1995, and certainly since 1998-2000, within the context of national area planning, and the multiple attempts at decentralised rezoning--and the continued affirmation of in situ heritage, located in a place from which it draws its legitimacy and which it in turn legitimates. From these two points of view, intangibility poses a challenge which the institutions of the Ministry of Culture and local actors are presently assessing.