UNESCO on the Ground: Local Perspectives on Intangible Cultural Heritage

By Michael Dylan Foster and Clare L. Stacey

For nearly 70 years, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has played a crucial role in developing policies and recommendations for dealing with intangible cultural heritage. What has been the effect of such sweeping global policies on those actually affected by them? How connected is UNESCO with what is happening every day, on the ground, in local communities? Drawing upon six communities ranging across three continents—from India, South Korea, Malawi, Japan, Macedonia and China—and focusing on festival, ritual, and dance, this volume illuminates the complexities and challenges faced by those who find themselves drawn, in different ways, into UNESCO's orbit. Some struggle to incorporate UNESCO recognition into their own local understanding of tradition; others cope with the fallout of a failed intangible cultural heritage nomination. By exploring locally, by looking outward from the inside, the essays show how a normative policy such as UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage policy can take on specific associations and inflections. A number of the key questions and themes emerge across the case studies and three accompanying commentaries: issues of terminology; power struggles between local, national and international stakeholders; the value of international recognition; and what forces shape selection processes. With examples from around the world, and a balance of local experiences with broader perspectives, this volume provides a unique comparative approach to timely questions of tradition and change in a rapidly globalizing world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9780253019530

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Local Studies

Leah Lowthorp

1Voices on the Ground: Kutiyattam, UNESCO, and the Heritage of Humanity

KUTIYATTAM SANSKRIT THEATER of Kerala state was recognized as India’s first UNESCO Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001. Looking back a decade later, how has UNESCO recognition impacted both the art and the lives of its artists? Based upon two years of ethnographic research from 2008 to 2010 among Kutiyattam artists in Kerala, India, this essay follows the art’s postrecognition trajectory through its increasing mediatization, institutionalization, and liberalization. Drawing on extended interviews with over fifty Kutiyattam actors, actresses, and drummers, it focuses on reclaiming the voices of affected artists on the ground.

Location: Kerala, India

Kerala is a state largely characterized by exceptionalism. Located on the southwestern coast of the Indian subcontinent along the Arabian Sea (figure 1), the region was known historically for its spice trade with much of the ancient world. At the turn of the twentieth century, Kerala was known for a number of exceptional characteristics—a matrilineal kinship system that gave women comparatively greater autonomy than women in other areas of India; the rule of distance pollution that created the most rigid caste system in India, with lower caste groups not only untouchable but unapproachable as well; and the relative religious equality, in terms of both tolerance and sheer numbers, between its resident Hindu, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish populations.¹ In the course of the twentieth century, Kerala experienced what Robin Jeffrey (1992, 2) has termed a social collapse more complete than anywhere in India that entailed the destruction of the matrilineal inheritance system, the spread of formal education and associated rising political activism, and an increasing cash economy that sparked land redistribution legislation by the world’s first (1957) democratically elected Communist government.²

FIGURE 1

Map of Kerala. Public domain image by Saravask, Wikimedia Commons. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:India_map_kerala.png.

The discourse of Kerala’s exceptionalism is most often articulated through what has become known as the Kerala model of development. Formulated in a 1975 report for the United Nations, the model is characterized by Kerala’s low per capita income and high levels of unemployment and poverty coupled with indicators more typical of highly industrialized regions of the developed world, including high levels of literacy and life expectancy and low levels of fertility and infant and maternal mortality (CDS 1975).³ Kerala currently has the highest literacy rate in India (93.91 percent), lowest infant mortality rate (1.4 percent), lowest population growth (4.86 percent), and only natural sex ratio (1.087:1 women-to-men)—factors that have often been attributed to the state’s dominant matrilineal past and political mobilization of social rights led by Kerala’s main Communist party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (Lukose 2009; see also Jeffrey 1992; Franke and Chasin 1992).⁴ More recently acknowledged for its vital role in the propagation of the Kerala model is the state’s long-standing migration to Gulf countries.⁵ Resulting remittances flowing into the state coupled with India’s widespread economic liberalization have led to an expansive commodity culture that gives Kerala, despite continued low economic growth, the highest per capita consumer expenditure in India (Lukose 2009; Kannan and Hari 2002). As the Kerala model has become increasingly unsustainable, however, many have come to regard it as a failed project, a utopia-cum-dystopia characterized by corruption, moral laxity, stagnant economy, widespread unemployment, high suicide rates, alcoholism, indebtedness, increasing violence against women and, more recently, AIDS (Sreekumar 2007,