ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the attempt by one community of French artisanal chocolatiers to identify their products, skills, and craft community as forms of intangible cultural heritage. French chocolatiers are as concerned with seeking recognition for a proven confectionery heritage as they are in producing new chocolate traditions that they represented as quintessentially French. Their initiatives draw on essentialist notions of cultural traditions that persist unchanged through time and on constructivist understandings of tradition that suggest evolving identities and practices within dynamic communities of practice. Contemporary chocolatiers' use of craft rituals, associations, and practices show how they continue to rework and represent their own particular heritage. In the twenty-first century, chocolatiers focus on the transmission of changing repertoires of skill, the organization of highly competitive expositions, the cultivation of single-origin chocolates that exemplify distinctive local terroirs, and the codification of specialized knowledge surrounding taste by community-appointed experts.
