scholarly journals Food Heritage and the Construction of Territory

Ethnologies ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 36 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 467-483
Author(s):  
Laurier Turgeon

In the Western academic tradition, tangible cultural heritage (monuments, buildings, sites and material objects) has generally been considered as a privileged means of constructing places and territory, whereas intangible cultural heritage (oral traditions, arts, crafts, feasts, rituals, song, music, dance) have been associated with the identification of ethnic groups. This article aims to demonstrate that intangible cultural heritage can also be a powerful means of the construction of place, through a case study that shows how the consumption of home-grown agricultural products in Quebec transforms territories into places of heritage. This transformative process is accomplished, first, by the symbolic production and consumption of place. By clearly identifying the place of origin of the product on the label, in writing as well as in image, the act of eating homegrown products entails a displacement of territory from their place of production to their place of incorporation. The distant and the faraway are brought home and made familiar. To further reinforce the domestication of place, the consumer is invited to come and purchase the homegrown product at the place of production and to bring it back home with him. Second, these places areheritagitizedthrough the social production and consumption of time. Homegrown products are expressions of the continuity of place through the material conservation of food (dehydration, salting, freezing, etc.), the process of ageing itself and, more importantly, the transmission of their intangible qualities (traditional knowledge, transmission of receipts, preservation of taste). These practices become specific to a place to the point that they give the product a distinctive taste that is passed on from generation to generation. It is through taste that the memory of people and place is reactivated. The author of the article further suggests that it is these intangible elements which most efficiently and forcefully express the heritage of place.

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
James Tsaaior

Scholarship negotiating African folktales and the entire folkloric tradition in Africa has always been constituted as harbouring fundamental lacks. One of these lacks is the supposed incapacity of oral cultures to produce high literature. However, it is true that folktales and other oral forms in Africa can participate actively in the social, political and cultural process. In this paper, we engage folktales told by the Tiv of central Nigeria and situate them within the dynamic of history, culture, modernity and national construction in Nigeria. The paper adopts a historicist and culturalist perspective in its interpretation of the folktales which were collected in particular Tiv communities. This methodological approach helps to crystallize the historical and cultural lineaments embedded in the people’s experiences, values and worldviews. It also constitutes a contextual background for the understanding of the folktales as they offer informed commentaries on social currents and political contingencies in Nigeria. It argues that though folktales belong to a pre-scientific and pre-industrial dispensation, they are part of the people’s intangible cultural heritage and are capable of distilling powerful statements which negotiate Nigerian modernity and postcolonial condition. The paper underscores the dynamism and functionality of folktales even in an increasingly globalised ethos.


2008 ◽  
Vol 37 (S1) ◽  
pp. 14-24
Author(s):  
Terri Janke

Abstract Indigenous knowledge is an integral part of Indigenous cultural heritage. Knowledge about land, seas, places and associated songs, stories, social practices, and oral traditions are important assets for Indigenous communities. Transmitted from generation to generation, Indigenous knowledge is constantly reinterpreted by Indigenous people. Through the existence and transmission of this intangible cultural heritage, Indigenous people are able to associate with a communal identity. The recording and fixing of Indigenous knowledge creates intellectual property (IP), rights of ownership to the material which the written or recorded in documents, sound recordings or films. Intellectual property rights allow the rights owners to control reproductions of the fixed form. IP laws are individual based and economic in nature. A concern for Indigenous people is that the ownership of the intellectual property which is generated from such processes, if often, not owned by them. The IP laws impact on the rights of traditional and Indigenous communities to their cultural heritage. This paper will explore the international developments, case studies, published protocols and policy initiatives concerning the recording, dissemination, digitisation, and commercial use of Indigenous knowledge.


2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-290
Author(s):  
Cornelius Holtorf

AbstractAccording to the logic of the conservation ethics, the heritage sector has the duty to conserve cultural heritage because it has inherent value and constitutes a non-renewable resource that once destroyed cannot be substituted and, therefore, must be preserved for the benefit of future generations. In this article, I argue, however, that the cultural heritage of the past is not a comprehensive legacy that theoretically, at any point, might have been considered complete but, rather, that it can be understood as frequently updated manifestations of changing perceptions of the past over time. The most important question for conservation and heritage management, thus, is not how much heritage of any one period may or may not survive intact into the future but, instead, which heritage, as our legacy to the generations to come, will benefit future societies the most. In particular, I am calling for more research into the possible significance of heritage in addressing some of the social consequences of climate change.


Author(s):  
Witte Bruno De

This chapter addresses linguistic heritage as part of cultural heritage. The use of a language not only serves as a means of functional communication but also expresses the speaker’s cultural identity as well as the cultural heritage developed by all previous users of that language. One can say that legal measures that allow for the public use of a particular language, or that impose the use of that language in certain contexts, contribute to the preservation of the cultural heritage of a country. However, UNESCO’s Intangible Heritage Convention includes within its scope the oral traditions and forms of expressions that use language as their tool. In other words, language is protected because, and to the extent that, it gives expression to an element of a community’s intangible cultural heritage other than the language itself. Therefore, international law plays only a limited role in protecting language-as-heritage.


2011 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hee-Eun Kim

AbstractThis article explores the interplay between climate change and cultural heritage, in particular the intangible aspects of cultural heritage, in international legal frameworks, either existing or under development. The prime focus of the current climate change regime of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, leaving certain aspects of cultural heritage rather on the sidelines of debate and policy. However, where climate change combines with generally weak law and policy for culture and traditions, countries vulnerable to climate change may face significant cultural loss in the years to come.In its inventory of present and contemplated legal protection options, this article draws particular attention to policymaking directed at shaping a “rights-based” system in the form of sui generis rights, to complement any existing intellectual property-based protection. If adequately motivated, indigenous people have a key role to play not only in observing change, but also in developing adaptive models to cope.


Author(s):  
Stepan Dychkovskyy

The purpose of the article consists of the study of the activity of skansen in the intangible cultural heritage system. The methodology is the application of historical, bibliographic, and analytical methods. The scientific novelty of the work is to justify the appropriateness and application of the new concept of tourism activity of scans in the system of intangible cultural heritage. Conclusions. Features of the development of tourism in a post-industrial society influenced the conceptual approaches to the museum topes, which first broadcast chronological meaning, but with the proliferation of skansen museums was beyond the phenomenological limits of time and space. The proliferation of scansions as interactive open-air exhibits became a reflection of changes in the cultural and socio-economic life of modern society. The trends in the development of active consumerism in the social and economic spheres, globalization processes, the growth of cultural and creative industries have identified new areas of activity for museums - skansens, which transformed from museums that showed ethnographic collections in the space of the formation of a new cultural being.


Author(s):  
Camille Senepin

The worship of the Four Palace [Tứ Phủ], recently named Đạo Mẫu [Mothers Godessess Religion] can be found in Vietnam and is mainly present in the Northern part of the country. After years of prohibition and stigmatization, this Four Palaces are inscribed as Intangible Cultural Heritage of the Unesco in December 2016. The worship and its possession ritual [ln đồng] were mostly analysed in Hanoi by Western and Vietnamese researchers. In this article, the author proposeses an analysis of the dynamics of the Four Palaces outside Hanoi, linked to the semantic transformation taking place within the worship. The importance of the locality and how specific places can create singular discourses about the deities, the mediums and the devotees are emphasized in this communication. The author demonstrates that the Đạo Mẫu community is imagined. Nevertheless, the author analyses how the locality can modify the representations and the perceptions of the spirits embodied by the medium, depending on the localisation of the speakers. This paper also highlighted the consequences of the heritagization on the vocabulary and the contemporary practices, and how it can change the ones that are considered unorthodox. In this analysis the author also mentions the significance of those discourses inside the social medias, mostly on Facebook, which is one of the contemporary challenges of the worship.


2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bogumil Jewsiewicki ◽  
Bob W. White

In many societies, especially those where individual and collective memory are marked by the trauma that can accompany authoritarian rule, people attempt to come to terms with the past by finding ways of making it relevant to the present. One way to understand this complex relationship with history is through a careful examination of the practice of mourning. Mourning constitutes, above all, a framework from which the deceased's relationship with the living is collectively inventoried, evaluated, and debated so that the social work of memory may graft the experiences of yesterday onto a horizon of expectations. Defining the status of the deceased means making important decisions about how to “move on,” since the moment of mourning is not only a moment for weighing the acts and deeds of the deceased, but also a way of testing more generally the criteria for becoming recognized as an ancestor. As death seems increasingly present in the lives of people in many parts of Africa, emerging forms of social mourning echo the need for new political futures, and mourning shows itself as an important terrain for the social production of meaning. The primary objective of this collection of articles is to look at how the process of mourning mediates between the past and the future, and how the practices and perceptions of mourning are linked to real and imagined divisions in political time. Mourning, in other words, is a way of rethinking time.


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