Decontextualization from UNESCO to China

This chapter focuses on the entanglement between ICH and economic development. Building on an ethnography of the policy chain linking the international level where this relationship is normatively defined with the local levels where it plays out, nuances, and complexifies the idea of "decontextualisation." While presented in the UNESCO discourse as the essence of "bad" commercialization, decontextualization is part and parcel of the implementation of the Convention already at the international level. Here, decontextualized ICH performances trigger embarrassment among ICH experts and safeguarding advocates. When the Convention is brought to life at the local level, decontextualization is intrinsic to ICH promotion. In China, where the commercialization of ICH is part of a strategy of poverty alleviation and explicitly encouraged by national laws and regulations, ICH transmitters perform their practice or sell their products in so-called ICH exposition parks or on online platforms specializing in the sale of ICH products. Rather than perceiving themselves as heritage victims, however, they embrace this form of decontextualization as empowered entrepreneurs. Against the backdrop of the Convention's participatory principle and its troublesome entanglement with neoliberal ideology, these examples paint a complex picture of decontextualization and its different perceptions by the actors involved in heritage making.