INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE AND ITS DOUBLE: SOCIAL PRACTICES THROUGH THE LENS OF THE NATIONAL PARTICIPATORY INVENTORY (FRANCE)

Abstract

The Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) is characterized by its consensual nature, allowing for agreement between States Parties, and for each of them to implement it according to their possibilities and specificities. This flexibility is mirrored at national level when it comes to interpreting it, if only to define what is or is not ICH. In this case, does naming a social practice as ICH amount to standardizing it, by informing it by certain ICH norms as defined by UNESCO? To what extent does the very identification of ICH via the Inventory in France consist in establishing a standardized representation of the social practice in question (its double)? The article suggests that the prism of the National ICH Inventory provides heritage communities with a triple reflexivity: methodological, axiological and anthropological. The relationship between heritage reflection and lived reality is to be explored.