Materiality, morality and (un)easiness. Association(s), anthropology and music heritage making in Portugal

ABSTRACT

What do anthropologists and cultural activists share during ethnographic investigations on heritage-making? What can the association of academics and cultural actors reveal about heritage as a process and heritage as a social fact? This paper draws on an ethnographic study on musical heritage-making in southern Portugal, especially focused on non-governmental associations involved in preserving and promoting traditional and popular music. After sketching out the context of the research, I present two modalities of association within anthropology and cultural activism in order to analyse the extent to which a sense of ease, discomfort or negotiation shape investigation practices in critical heritage studies. Using one local heritage association as an example, I show how social hierarchy, knowledge legitimacy and material techniques of heritage-making function as criteria of the mutual assessment put into practice by the activists and academics present in the field. I also argue that taking the easiness and uneasiness of such ethnographic associations into account helps draw out the ties between morality and materiality of heritage-making.

KEYWORDS:

• Portugal
• music
• anthropology
• heritage-making
• association

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. English-speaking literature on cante alentejano remains limited but see the short state of the art by Sousa (2011) or the chapter written by the ethnomusicologist Castelo-Branco (2008).

2. Cante Alentejano, polyphonic singing from Alentejo, southern Portugal, Representative list of intangible cultural heritage of humanity, UNESCO, 2014. https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/cante-alentejano-polyphonic-singing-from-alentejo-southern-portugal-01007?RL=01007.

3. See Instituto Nacional de Estatística, https://ine.pt/xportal/xmain?xpid=INE&xpgid=ine_indicadores&indOcorrCod=0009085&contexto=pi&selTab=tab0, accessed 16 September 2019.

4. See Público, 31 January 2019, ‘Museu Nacional da Música vai ser transferido por inteiro para o Palácio de Mafra’, https://www.publico.pt/2019/01/31/culturaipsilon/noticia/museu-nacional-musica-vai-transferido-inteiro-palacio-mafra-1860232, last accessed 30/09/2019.

5. In Portugal, groups of citizens acting together within the non-profit cultural domain are a long-standing tradition (Viegas and Leite 1986), making up what is called the third sector (sector terceiro), legally framed by the different status like associations, cooperatives and foundations (Lourenço, Gomes, and Martinho 2006, 79).

6. The current website of the association (http://pedexumbo.com/) does not necessarily reflect the situation of I worked on during my fieldwork.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cyril Isnart

Cyril Isnart, Research Fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research and member of the IDEMEC (Aix Marseille Université CNRS); Cyril Isnart is an anthropologist and currently works on religion, music and heritage-making in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean. He was responsible for the international programme ‘Religious Memories and Heritage Practices in the Mediterranean. Confessional Coexistence and Heritage Assertion’ (2013–2015), funded by the research agency of Portugal FCT and co-founded the international Network of Researchers on Heritagisations known as Respatrimoni in 2009 (repatrimoni.wordpress.com). He is the editor of the journal Lusotopie. He co-edited with Julien Bondaz, Florence Graezer Bideau and Anais Leblon, Les vocabulaires locaux du ‘patrimoine’, Zurich, Lit Verlag 2014) and with Cerezales Nathalie, The Religious Heritage Complex. Legacy, Conservation, and Christianity (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2020).