Intangible cultural heritage and the better angels of folklore’s nature

Abstract

Folklore research in the United States typically is completed either through academic departments or in organisations designed to create public presentations of traditional expressive culture. These two approaches are termed ‘academic folklore’ and ‘public folklore’. The intellectual history of both approaches has recently been critiqued. One result of this deconstruction is an ambivalence over the historical legacy of key concepts in the study of folklore. Assessing elements of the critical study of folklore’s history – in both academe and the public sector – suggests opportunities for reconstituting the study of traditional culture to establish a more socially responsive approach that is relevant to ways that heritage professionals assess folklore as intangible culture heritage.

Keywords:

• Public folklore
• romantic nationalism
• intangible cultural heritage
• tradition

Notes

1. Along with UNESCO and ICOMOS’s web sites, there is a wealth of new scholarship on ICH. In particular, the recent volume Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage, edited by Michelle L. Stefano, Peter David, and Gerard Corsane (2012) provides an excellent collection of articles on the topic from international perspectives. UNESCO’s portal for ICH is http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/. ICOMOS can be found at http://www.icomos.org/en.

2. The complete passage is in the concluding paragraph of Lincoln’s speech. He intended his oratory to save the nation from the looming threat of the American Civil War: ‘I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature’. From Inaugural addresses of the Presidents of the United States. Washington, D.C.: U.S. G.P.O.