the performativity and dynamics of intangible cultural heritage

As cultural templates for action, the practices of intangible cultural heritage develop a specific regularity,
conventionality and correctness implying a practical horizon of apperception and knowledge for communities. It is
impossible to determine whether the cultural practices arise from the social order or whether the social order is
generated in the first instance through cultural actions. The practices of intangible cultural heritage are bodily
practices, which determine form and content of experiencing, thinking and remembering, and which reduce and
extend, channel and transform them. For that reason, they generate a special form of reality. Within them, the
point is not truth, but taking the right action. The correctness of communal action means that the protagonists are
able to decode the symbolic content of a situation according to specific rules produced through the practices of
intangible cultural heritage. These practices aim at correctness and thus at ordering communal action in a way
compulsory for all participants. If the common practice of cultural action is based upon a structural asymmetry,
the practices of intangible cultural heritage may also serve adaptation, manipulation or suppression.
3. The production of identification through practices of intangible cultural heritage
The potential for identification and transformation of practices of intangible cultural heritage stems from their
symbolical and performative character, it resides in their creative and reality-generating dimension. In them, a
new order is produced, the achievement of a new state of being, the emergence of a new cultural reality – a
cultural reality which looks as though it were natural and which for that reason makes distancing oneself from (or
resisting to) it difficult. In may cultural practices, things revolve around an "evocation", that is to say, around the
ascription of a competency, an ability. These identificatory practices are performances which bring forth what they
denote, by enjoining humans to an ability which they do not yet possess, and by at the same time recognising
them as those which they are yet to become. In this process, cultural being emerges through ascriptions,
denotations and categorisations.
4. Practices of intangible cultural heritage as remembrance and projection
Practices of intangible cultural heritage serve the purpose of time and again reassuring oneself of the presence of
a community, of reasserting through repetition its timeless and immutable order and its potential for
transformation and of giving both permanence. They aim as much at the staging of continuity, timelessness and
immutability as at the process-like character and the future- and projection-orientation of communities. Practices
of intangible cultural heritage synthesise social memories and communal projections of the future. The cultural
mediation of dealing with time fosters temporal and social competence. Ordered temporal patterns are a medium
of social life – viz. the way the cultural order of time structures the entirety of life in industrial society. The time of
the practices of intangible cultural heritage is the co-presence of the community members, whose time is in turn
itself divided into temporal sequences by these practices. In this way, cultural action promotes certain memories
and exposes others to withering away. By their repetitive structure, many practices of intangible cultural heritage
signal durability and immutability and thus produce and control social memory. Cultural performances bring past
events into the presence, make them accessible to present experience. With the aid of efforts at cultural
remembrance, a connection may be formed between the presence (threatened with being forgotten) and that past
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