A critique of unfeeling heritage

Those of us who have pushed for recognition of 'the intangible' in heritage work are also those who tend to stress the 'cultural' in cultural heritage. We try to resist the tendency of heritage discourse to reduce culture to things, we try to counter its privileging of physical fabric over social life (for example, Byrne 1995, Byrne in press). The UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003) seems to us to be a mixed blessing. While it has the potential to bring more focus to the social dimension of heritage it seems also to want to regard social practices, skills and traditions as the equivalent of heritage objects, places or landscapes.