Le rôle des experts dans la création de l’inventaire du patrimoine culturel immatériel en Suisse

En 2008, la Suisse ratifiait conjointement deux Conventions de l’Unesco, celle pour la sauvegarde du patrimoine culturel immatériel (désormais PCI) de 2003 et celle sur la protection et la promotion de la diversité des expressions culturelles de 2005. L’adhésion de la Suisse à cette politique patrimoniale internationale a été préparée et débattue en novembre 2008 lors du Forum suisse pour le PCI, à l’initiative de la Commission suisse de l’Unesco dans l’objectif de rassembler et confronter l..

Politiques de la tradition. le patrimoine culturel immatériel

Depuis quelques années, un nouveau concept circule: le patrimoine culturel immatériel. Il regroupe des activités telles que musiques et danses traditionnelles, rites et rituels, savoir-faire artisanaux et connaissances populaires. En adhérant en 2008 à la Convention de l'UNESCO pour la sauvegarde de ce patrimoine, la Suisse s'est engagée à en faire l'inventaire sur son territoire, sous la forme d'une «Liste des traditions vivantes». Ce livre saisit l'occasion des dix ans de cette adhésion pour faire le point sur le sens et les effets de ce nouveau dispositif patrimonial, qui représente un facteur de cohésion sociale et d'ancrage identitaire crucial pour toute collectivité. S'engager à le sauvegarder, c'est fournir l'occasion d'honorer le passé et de débattre de l'avenir. Que voulons-nous garder des pratiques et croyances de nos aïeuls? La réponse à cette question passe nécessairement par une réflexion sur les politiques de la tradition, en Suisse et sur la scène internationale

Developing interdisciplinary and intercultural skills in engineers through short-term field experiences

Short-term field study experiences are increasingly popular in engineering education. Where they include an international dimension, they can also develop skills and knowledge needed for working across cultures and in interdisciplinary teams. Such programs can take students out of their ‘comfort zone’, thereby enabling them to question their previously taken-for-granted assumptions. Here we analyze four different case studies of organizing short-term international field study programs in engineering education which share a methodology of mixing student disciplines and skills, of interaction with people from other cultures or contexts, and using reflection tools drawn from social and human sciences. While such programs appear to directly address skills desired in engineering students, it was extremely challenging to fit them within the constraints of a traditional university program and to have their modes of reflection accepted as valid by more traditional engineering education practitioners

Le patrimoine culturel immatériel au seuil des sciences sociales

L’entrée en vigueur de la Convention sur la sauvegarde du patrimoine culturel immatériel (PCI) de 2003 a abouti, dès 2009, au dépôt des premières candidatures sur les listes de l’Unesco, alors même que le champ du PCI était encore peu connu des chercheurs et des acteurs du patrimoine. Après plusieurs années marquées par la prédominance des recherches ethnologiques sur ce nouveau patrimoine, le Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle (Normandie) accueillait du 24 au 29 septembre 2012 un colloque international rassemblant des chercheurs de plusieurs disciplines (ethnologues, anthropologues, économistes, juristes, historiens, géographes), des responsables de l’Unesco, des fonctionnaires de l’administration culturelle et des acteurs de terrain associatifs. Les participants y confrontaient pour la première fois des lectures contrastées de l’histoire du PCI, de la valeur politique de ce patrimoine et du rôle qu’y tient la participation des « communautés ». Nourrit de nombreuses études de cas empruntées au contexte international mais aussi au contexte territorial de la Normandie, ce colloque de Cerisy fut ainsi la première entreprise intellectuelle collective de grande ampleur consacrée au PCI où ont été énoncés les prémisses de recherches pluridisciplinaires promises aux développements que l’on constate aujourd’hui. Il a de ce fait constitué un tournant décisif dans les études patrimoniales liées à l’immatériel. Cet important volume réunit les actes de cette rencontre majeure qui a fait date dans l’histoire de la réflexion sur la mise en œuvre de la Convention Unesco

Nurturing the socialist spiritual civilization: Interplay between anthropology and politics

Since the 1940s, rural traditional dance of the North-West region plays a pivotal part in the making of cultural policy in RPC. Transformed and politized by cultural cadres at Yan'an, social and recreational practices such as yangge dance became propaganda tools for addressing revolutionary issues among local population. Compulsory supervised activity in work-units, it embodies the New China promoted by Mao Zedong until the Cultural Revolution in 1966. In the 1990s, yangge dance reappears in the form of everyday urban carnivals. Groups of neighborhood dancers, so-called spontaneous or religious/traditional, revive this tradition of gathering for ritual or profane occasions. Yangge fever takes hold of society and such dancing practices are gradually recuperated to breathe new life into official narrative: the Chinese socialist spiritual and material civilization promoted by Deng Xiaoping. Major cultural surveys on folkloric practices carried out in the 1980s across the country have paved the way for the revival of inventorying projects on cultural heritage alongside interests for Chinese presence and visibility on the international UNESCO arena. The paper build on empirical case studies from Beijing and Shaanxi Province that reveals conflictual modalities of the interplay between various stakeholders involved in the promotion of such dancing activities. Issues related to transmission modes and legitimate recognition of “authentic” practices are discussed to better understand the selection criteria that endorse a new “healthy” civilized lifestyle within the Chinese population. This also includes the role played by anthropologists on the ground as both as sustainer and disrupter of the performative meaning assigned by the cultural authorities

L’instrumentalisation de la culture populaire. Le cas de la danse du yangge en Chine

This article analyses how Chinese authorities instrumentalise popular culture with the aim of constructing a policy for governing national cultural practices. This instrumentalisation will be illustrated by the yangge dance, a popular traditional practice among the Chinese masses that has attracted the interest of the ruling elites several times within twentieth century China, notably by serving as a cornerstone for the construction of Maoist cultural policy. A historical and contextualised interpretation of the yangge dance illustrated by case studies taken from fieldwork carried out in Beijing and Shaanxi will retrace the application of this political project and the instrumentalisation of culture as an intentional strategy. The paper demonstrates how a secular ritual is taken over and transformed into a tool of political propaganda, creating a national model of entertainment; it also shows, however, how dancers are reappropriating some aspects of this practice with the emergence of a civil society

Inventories without archives: the list of “Living Traditions in Switzerland”

Since ratifying the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2008, Swiss cultural authorities have taken its innovative cultural philosophy to heart. Despite the central role of tradition and folklore in the history of this country, federal and cantonal actors in the field of ICH have moved resolutely away from an archivistic approach and towards the newly coined (and in some ways oxymoronic) concept of “living traditions”. Based on five years of research into this process, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, this paper analyses the making of Swiss Living Traditions in historical and anthropological perspective. It pays particular attention to the institutional processes behind the creation of the national inventory in 2012 and to the selection of 8 ICH items for the UNESCO ICH List. It explores the forms of expertise that contributed to these processes and the impact they could have on the continuity of living traditions in the future. The absence of specific mechanisms for archiving these traditions highlights some of the contradictions at the heart of this global cultural framework