The aim of this volume, as Michael Dylan Foster writes in his introduction, is to add to the “ground-breaking work” of earlier texts such as the 2012 edited volume by Regina Bendix, Aditya Eggert, and Arnika Peselmann through a “focus on the particularly intimate perspectives of people living in communities touched by” recently enacted policies associated with UNESCO to protect and sustain the intangible cultural heritage (2). ^{Footnote 1} The project had its roots as the editors noted the diverse ways in which folklorists discussed intangible heritage at the 2011 American Folklore Society conference. A panel at the 2012 conference was set up, and, after additional scholars and commentators were recruited, a double issue of the Journal of Folklore Research was produced. That double issue is republished here.

UNESCO on the Ground seeks to match the local and specific with the meta-cultural dimensions that globalization brings, while in some way accounting for the increasing international attention to the intangible heritage that has marked recent decades. Such an attempt is desirable, not least because scholarly attention tends to zoom in on the specifics of cultural production of discrete socio-cultural groups, while policy is enacted at national and international levels. Hence, the volume juxtaposes six case studies with three commentaries. To facilitate comparison, each case study follows a pre-ordained structure, presenting an introduction to the specific intangible heritage element, a description of its geographical/cultural location, a brief description, its status in regard to UNESCO, a reflection on local on-the-ground perspectives and discussion.

Each of the three commentaries then adopts different approaches to reflect on the case studies. Arguably, though, too much is made to hang from the compact case studies, not least because the relative brevity of each requires that the large amount of literature now available on intangible heritage—particularly local, insider documentation—is either glossed over or ignored. The effect is to jump from the specificity of each case study to the meta-culturality of the commentaries in a way that does not marry the case studies to broader genres or cultural complexes of which they form a part. The second case study, by Kyoim Yun, illustrates this. She considers a single South Korean shaman ritual from the island of Cheju off the southern coast—one of many Korean shaman rituals, and one of ten shaman rituals out of more than a hundred nationally designated intangible cultural properties. Can this be considered representative, when, in complying with the pre-ordained structure, the account ignores virtually all of the literature on Korean heritage legislation, on shamanism within it, and on the critical disjuncture encountered in Korea between shamanism as backward and outdated and shamanism as something to be preserved?

This last aspect is also pertinent to Lisa Gilman’s case study on Vimbuza in Malawi, where the ritual and healing aspects are locally controversial because of legislation against witchcraft, Christian proselytization, and appeals to modernize—hence, Gilman’s chapter title, “Demonic or Cultural Treasure.” She notes that Vimbuza was recognized as a UNESCO Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity—and later became an element on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity—without many local practitioners or patients knowing anything about UNESCO. She usefully discusses how Vimbuza counters the privileging of Western cultural practices in Africa, but how it can also readily feed the common stereotyping of “African” culture. Exploring the desirability and potential for creating hybrid forms, she echoes common themes in the literature on cultural heritage and on folk music revivals more specifically, discussing how designation required festival performances to be created out of ritual and how institutions were established to oversee them. However, she does not connect these observation to other literature and makes little mention of the accounts of others on African ritual.

Leah Lowthrop writes the first case study on India’s first UNESCO Masterpiece, Kutiyattam, a living example of a Sanskrit drama. Lowthrop also discusses common themes, since the story of Kutiyattam as intangible heritage is a tale of the rise of institutions and the increased social mobility of artists, coupling to a loss of artistic freedom, the pursuit of money over the pursuit of artistry, and arguments about whether to keep a static tradition or to allow new choreographies. Lowthrop hints at some of the relevant literature in her conclusion, but the key explorations in her text concern the specifics of social and political changes that have occurred since 1948. Royal patronage and matrilineal inheritance have been swept aside, democratizing the artistic community and moving performances out of temples and palaces. The result of these is Kutiyattam, and its artists have changed in a way that cannot be reversed without the loss of the genre.

The fourth case study, Michael Dylan Foster’s account of Toshidon, a visiting deity ritual on Shimo-Koshikijima, a small island off the southwestern coast of Japan, is the most tightly focused of all six. Foster describes how Toshidon has been designated both as a Japanese intangible folk cultural property and, since 2009, as one of the first round of elements placed on UNESCO’s Representative List (Foster does not detail what an “intangible folk property,” as opposed to an “intangible property,” might be, but Anthony Seeger, later in the volume, points readers to an account by Shino Arisawa that does). ^{Footnote 2} Shimo-Koshikijima has an ageing population of less than 2,500, and, today, there is a declining need for the ritual, which involves a masked figure of the deity travelling from house to house to visit elementary school age children on New Year’s Eve or shortly thereafter. Designation is considered a catalyst for increased tourism, even though, to date, this has proved to be true in only limited ways, but it is also considered a burden for the local population: the designation cannot be undone, but it is up to islanders to use it to their advantage, “to wield it with tactical flexibility as they negotiate the realities and future of life on a small island” (89).

The fifth case study is by the ethnomusicologist Carol Silverman. She explores Macedonian Teškoto, a dance for which the application to UNESCO for a masterpiece designation failed on two attempts. Silverman relates how the standard pose celebrated on tourist posters, a male dancer standing with one foot on a drum, dates largely from a 1950s revival and how the application to UNESCO supplanted a professionalized form for something more grassroots. She identifies a racist agenda in the downplaying of the traditional use of the dance by Muslim communities and the Roma identity of its musicians. However, Teškoto has, despite the lack of UNESCO recognition, become iconic, used to promote tourism and celebrate a revisionist folklore that marks the (disputed) nation state.

Finally, Ziying You’s case study explores the worship of ancient sage-kings in Shanxi Province, China. She gives physical substance to what Foster in his case study accepts is an imaginary UNESCO, and her conclusion is controversial: “The conflicts I am observing … are caused by UNESCO despite the fact that [sage-king veneration] has not even been nominated for the UNESCO list. In other words … the UNESCO Convention [2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage] set off a chain of events and national lists that ultimately had a profound effect on the communities involved” (126). ^{Footnote 3} Yes, UNESCO policies change things, but, for You’s statement to stand a much more detailed investigation of timing, local discourse and agency would be necessary. Indeed, while You refers to Helen Rees’s 2000 account of Naxi music (and to an account of UNESCO and Cambodian tangible heritage by Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin), she omits the discussions on Chinese intangible heritage that have proliferated in the new millennium. ^{Footnote 4}

It is the compression of the wider contextualization to comply with a set format that leaves me asking for more from each case study. The reason is because I have become accustomed to extended ethnographies that steer what I would characterize as the area studies line: close readings that couch particularity within a wider historical, cultural, and political understanding. But I accept that particularized ethnographies tend to limit cross-cultural comparison and often portray local perceptions at the expense of theoretical concepts and practices shared across borders—globalization, neoliberalism, marketization, tourism, heritage, and so on. The result, arguably, is that academic ethnographies struggle to influence policy, and this is what the three commentaries seek to address, notwithstanding their reliance on the six highly diverse case studies. Vladimir Tr. Hafstein’s contribution notes at the outset that the intangible heritage discourse regards globalization as alienating and as a threat to indigeneity. He characterizes heritage as a disease that needs diagnosis, and it is the case studies that give him prescriptions for treatment—safeguarding measures, validation from outside the locale, and realignments of the relationships of people to their own cultural practices. But, again citing the case studies, he notes that treatment has side effects that disempower, reduce the financial viability of artistic practices, and increase the burden on communities and governments to provide ongoing subsidies. He concludes that heritage has, whether we like it or not, entered the food chain, and in an epilogue strikingly subtitled “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up!” he points out that, as a disease, it is now spreading so fast that Belgium even wants to protect its french fries.

Seeger’s commentary also seeks an alignment between particularities at the local (case study) and global (UNESCO) levels, but it does so for a different reason to Hafstein. Seeger asks for a nuanced understanding of UNESCO, not as a distant, controlling, monolithic institution but, rather, as a set of competing entities that argue and discuss, hammer out plans, and recommend policies. His conclusion resonates with my comments above: “Our ethnographies need to be as attuned to the specifics of what part of UNESCO we refer to as they are to what different members of local communities think about the effects of UNESCO-attributed policies on their own lives” (140). The third commentator, Dorothy Noyes, may well not have read Seeger’s comments since, frustratingly, she contrasts the attention to local detail that the six case studies give with making the slipper “fit a disappearing local” when “Prince UNESCO comes calling” (162). She, like Hafstein, compares the six case studies, using them to identify side effects of the intangible cultural heritage movement. So, while heritage constitutes only one aspect of a global move towards local recognition—a move that also involves indigeneity, spirituality, and ecology that I consider has been brilliantly explored by Thomas Karl Alberts—the networks it fosters between local and global partners and between local performers and international audiences, create ever more opportunities for alienation: “the more representation, the more misrepresentation” (172). ^{Footnote 5} Noyes concludes that the heritage movement is a part of neoliberalism and the circulation of global capital rather than a struggle against an Appadurian deterritorialization. If so, who should be more depressed: the scholars who study intangible cultural heritage or the communities who own it?