Between durable lost and burocratic institution. The globalization of the notion of inmaterial patrimony

Abstract

The article brings out a problematic of the immaterial patrimony in which the process of the official institution can be accounted for and in that way the process of cultural heritage. Thus, what is trying to be put in perspective is about the discursive reiteration of a pretended intangible dimension, produced by different social actors. Attention has been detained in the intermittent relation, i.e. punctual, precarious or in a constant construction, that its actions maintain with the mythologies, assumed as inspiring of a legacy reclaimed as spiritual or affective, susceptible of a ritual reactualization, museistic, touristic, etc., under the shape of possible tradition.

In the creation of immaterial patrimony, we assist a sort of inversion in the process: the monument is no longer understood as a catalyst of social memories, but it rather represents the commemorative practices that archive, in the form of rites with the value of documents, the intangibility or the invisibility of the past. In this way, immateriality would express the discursive ways through which collective and individual intentions of the making-knowing and the can-convert the past into cultural property is affirmed. Immaterial patrimony would be also the symbolic reservoir of what might have disappeared.