Europe’s Peat Fire: Intangible Heritage and the Crusades for Identity

Abstract

Rob van der Laarse explores conflicts around the supposed ownness of intangible cultural heritage through examples from the recent (political) rediscovery of folklore in contemporary Europe. Recently, the promotion of, and identification with, national and regional folklore have been hijacked by European populist parties and movements. In their discourses, real and imaged folklore phenomena have been transformed into political means to foster territorial cultural identities and their “authenticity”. Through examples from the Netherlands and other European countries, the chapter critically discusses the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003) and its role in stimulating contestation of the ownership of heritage by enabling (political) actors to utilize the concept of intangible cultural heritage for cultural identity-building projects.

‘Travelling landscapes’ and the potential of Artscapes

“…To illustrate this process, I draw on Rob van der Laarse’s work on Europe’s many terrorscapes ; namely, landscapes that were the site of violence and terror, and which consequently trigger memories and narrative struggles that are used – and sometimes abused – by various appropriators for a variety of reasons; the framing of such landscapes according to specific ‘spacetime’ settings of terror leads to a situation in which traumatic memories compete with other memories, the latter often being left with no room to be collectively remembered and commemorated within the public realm. Thus, terrorscapes are fundamental to Artscapes (they already resonate within the concept), for terrorscapes encourage us to examine the ‘spacetime’ use of ‘past-landscapes’ and their associated memories and narratives in political debate and contemporary culture, as well as their historical, religious and symbolic meanings (van der Laarse et al, 2014).…”

“…Similar confrontations between Israel’s national memory ( here ) and traumatic Holocaust landscapes ( there ) also appear in other Artscapes , for example, Krieger’s collaboration with local artists in his performance at the Neuengamme Memorial ( NOW (THE CAMP) , 2015; Figure 3). By linking the history of that specific Holocaust landscape with the history of the Sinti and Roma refugees housed at the site in the 1980s, including their famous 1989 civil rights protests (Matras, 1998), the complexity of this landscape biography challenges the limiting of terrorscapes to one memorial narrative and/or specific period as an act that others those who do not ‘fit’ the hegemonic spatial narrative (van der Laarse et al, 2014).…”

Understanding Intangible Culture Heritage Preservation via Analyzing Inhabitants’ Garments of Early 19th Century in Weld Quay, Malaysia

“…Most remarkably, the 2003 Convention proclaimed that embracing and safeguarding ICH would be "a guarantee of sustainable development" [7][8][9]. At the same time, the policies of safeguarding ICH also protect and avoid the phenomenon of intolerance, to give treats of deterioration, disappearance, and destruction of the ICH [10,11]. The ICH protection endangers it from cultural globalization and social transformation and ensures the continuity of communities' living heritage.…”