| Summary: | The 2003 intangible cultural heritage convention is often interpreted as a radical break with earlier definitions of heritage which were Western, centered on materiality and on the knowledge of experts. By incorporating intangible dimensions and by placing communities at the heart of the definition of what heritage is, this text appears to operate a major reversal. In this article, however, we try to understand this UNESCO convention in the context of preoccupations that are in fact as old as the definition of heritage in France, whereby the quality of material evidence is linked to the wealth of contextual data, which struggled for conservation in situ rather than displacement, seen to be the equivalent of destruction. This approach ultimately results in the inclusion of the community in the conservation process, although this inclusion raises its own problems. In his ‘Letters in Miranda’, in 1796, Quatremère de Quincy contests the ‘repatriation of artworks’ and refers to this ‘crowd of objects without value for study, now unrelated to the ideas that gave them life’. Here perhaps are some sources for an archaeology of the intangible cultural heritage and seeds for the future development of the notion of context. This new attention given to the preeminence of the context, including the role of the community as a subject of its development, is to be found in the French model of eco-museums. Authors such as Chanzeaux, Laurence Wylie, or Chebika and Jean Duvignaud submit their statements not only to the scrutiny of the scientific community, but also share their observations with the human community which is the object of these observations. Science and its criteria thus expose themselves to the non-scholarly world, in open discussions, and undertake to assess how this knowledge affects human groups and to favour the process of invention of the heritage as it mobilises actors as a whole, rather than only the thing designated. What becomes the notions of expertise, authenticity and universality if heritage now consists of what a community generates and which, under the terms of the convention, ‘provides a sense of identity and continuity’?
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