ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most controversial issues in the negotiation of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage concerned the creation, designation, and purpose of its lists. The final text provides for three types of lists: a Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, a List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding, and national inventories of intangible heritage. The first of these, in particular, is a compromise solution reached after intense confrontations between those national delegates who wanted to create a merit-based ‘List of Treasures’ or ‘List of Masterpieces’ similar to the World Heritage List, those who would rather have seen an inclusive universal inventory of traditional practices, and those who wanted no list at all. In the final text of the Convention, the provisions for the Representative List are vague enough to postpone this debate until the present time when state parties are revisiting it. In what follows, I analyse the arguments put forward by delegates in the
debate on listing – from incentive and promotion value to divisiveness and hierarchisation – and I argue that in fact these go to the heart of heritage practices, which are always and inevitably selective. The system of heritage, in other words, is structured on exclusion: it gives value to certain things rather than others with reference to an assortment of criteria that can only ever be indeterminate. In this respect, heritage and lists are not unlike one another: both depend on selection, both decontextualise their objects from their immediate surroundings and recontextualise them with reference to other things designated or listed. It is hardly surprising, then, that listing seems constantly to accompany heritage making. Heritage lists fuse aesthetic, ethical, and administrative concerns in a rather unique fashion. They celebrate the virtues of particular populations while fuelling a cultural contest among them. Making a people visible to itself and their practices to the world at large, such lists are ultimately designed to channel funds and attention to the task of safeguarding. Once they have been made and are available for circulation, however, lists tend to take on a life of their own; they can be put to uses quite unlike – even diametrically opposed to – those their creators had in mind. The World Heritage List is a case in point, with
tourism gradually taking precedence over preservation as its driving concern and principal context of use. It remains to be seen to what uses the Representative List will be put.
