Between narratives and lists: performing digital intangible heritage through global media

Abstract

Global media represents and transmits the intangible cultural heritage of nation states officially safeguarded by UNESCO. Intangible heritage sanctioned by this international institution is disseminated on YouTube videos featured on UNESCO’s online intangible heritage lists including its representative list as well as within the social space of this video-hosting service. As YouTube is in large part produced by user-generated content, it has the potential to continuously store heritage as it occurs in lived circumstances, to a certain extent capturing the shifting nature of embodied practice. Whereas the UNESCO YouTube videos posted on the online representative list freeze intangible heritage (often in accordance with nationalist aims of current governments), the proliferation of user-generated YouTube videos of the very practices officially safeguarded potentially re-enacts heritage as it changes and takes on new shapes. This possibility is based upon YouTube’s status as a new archival structure that transmits information through video content that produces narratives as well as through algorithms that generate lists. The claim that narratives and lists on YouTube might counter the fossilising of representations of national intangible heritage is explored through the case study of the Mevlevi Sema Ceremony of Turkey, which was officially safeguarded by UNESCO in 2005.

Keywords:

• intangible heritage
• archive
• YouTube
• digital humanities
• Mevlevi Sema Ceremony

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Bahar Aykan, Mercan Dede, Burcu Gurkan, Defne Karaosmanoğlu, Kerem Karaosmanoğlu, Britta Timm Knudsen, Verena Laschinger, Marcella Özenç, Joshua Parker, Ralph Poole, Marc Raboy, Ingrid Schmutzhart, Laurajane Smith and William Straw as well as audiences in Seattle, Montreal, Paris and Salzburg for their comments on earlier versions of this article.