ABSTRACT
The preservation of heritage has never been embraced with more energy than in today’s uncertain times, at a major junction in the history of humanity, marked in particular by a shift in large-scale contacts between societies and by the relentless, consumerist exploitation of the world’s resources. A change in the mechanisms which regulate ‘production of locality’ (Appadurai 1996) heralded this state of affairs. This new awareness also has a price: it is when everything or almost everything collapses around them that people cast around, in their panic, for reference points or markers that will enable them to steady destinies caught up in the storm. It is in such a climate that heritage, be it of sites, objects, practices or ideas, is produced and assimilated into an ‘invented tradition’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). The acquisition of heritage status of intangible or non-material kind has
two major implications. On the one hand, it introduces a distortion between the heritage and the locality (and society) that gave birth to it. Heritage status results in a loss of connection with the territory, can be reproduced anywhere on the planet, even if a link with the locality is kept. It enters, through the mobility of people and the merchandising of culture, a circuit now operating on a global or nearly global scale. Today the virtual dimension of the internet emphasises even more the lack of territorial identity of cultural heritage elements. On the other hand, the production of an intangible cultural heritage inevitably requires sacrificing something, that very thing that turns cultural facts into heritage; these facts can no longer be the same, they become other, especially for those who own or perform them. These two dimensions, one intrinsic, the other extrinsic, stem from the meeting of the global and the local, one defining the other and vice versa. A kind of ‘authentic illusion’ is thus created and lies at the basis of the process of heritage creation. It is in this context – where local identification is paired with the work of
standardisation undertaken notably by UNESCO – that the recognition of intangible cultural heritage operates. It faces multiple local and supra-local
challenges which have not yet been the subject of close study. The present article hopes to contribute to this research, by going back to the origins of the take-over of the heritage domain, on a local as well as on an international level. We shall retrace the major stages in the process of identification, of recognition and of rendering visible (‘visibilisation’) cultural elements which have, in the process, acquired a dual status as identity markers both for local communities and for the heritage of the whole of humanity. I shall draw on my participation in the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2003 and my engagement, at a local level in Morocco, in defining the intangible national heritage. A critical and constructive analysis of this to-ing and fro-ing between the local and the global should allow us, as much as possible, to understand the creation and the workings of the process of heritage creation at a micro and macro scale. Examples from Morocco, in particular from the Place Jemaâ El Fna in Marrakech and the Moussem of Tan-Tan, declared Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001 and 2005, respectively, will serve to illustrate this anthropological approach to heritage.
