O desafio de não ficarmos pela preservação do património cultural imaterial

Abstract

The adoption by the UNESCO General Conference of the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, in October of 2003, has the underlying intention of sensitization and cultural protection that can only be of gratifi cation to the discipline of anthropology given the increasing volume and vitality of the notion of culture that this implies. However, the conceptualization of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) through above all the paradigm of safeguarding is archival, embodying a preservationist ethos which has a limiting potential that begs a challenge. The preservationist implications should be analyzed namely at the level of museum activities, defending in this paper the necessity of going beyond the dominance of such ethos, so that the museum institution is no longer the Mausoleum referred by Theodor Adorno (1967) – which celebrates only the survival of the past – and can contribute as well to the fl ourishing and renovation of contemporary cultural realities.